Aircraft flying over Poland and the Baltic once again reported major discrepancies in their GPS signals this week, only the latest in several apparent attacks on the navigation system on the edge of Russia’s war in Ukraine on which the modern world has come to depend.
Half of Poland and much of the Baltic Sea pinged as suffering from interference with the U.S. military-backed Global Positioning System (GPS), a satellite-based navigation aid made available to the public in the 1980s and now present in everything from cell phones and cars to enormous oil tanker ships and passenger jets. It is passenger jets which revealed the unreliability of the signal, given their unshielded position in the sky makes them more vulnerable to sources of interference.
GPSJAM revealed the extent of the interference by mapping publicly available data from passenger jets flying over Europe, showing areas where aircraft couldn’t get a good GPS signal. While areas near fighting in the Ukraine war always suffer from bad GPS reception — as well as other conflicts worldwide including over the Eastern Mediterranean and Israel — there have been several incidences of apparent GPS interference over Poland and the Baltic in recent weeks.
Polish news magazine Wprost reports the phenomenon has been experienced several times in recent months, but recently the interference has been more widespread. Other recent periods of interference have been described as “massive” and theorised the source of the issue was Russian jamming equipment in the Kaliningrad Oblast — a small, separate piece of territorial Russia surrounded by European Union member states.
The latest incident on the 17th came as Sweden’s Military Intelligence and Security Service (MUST) said it was investigating the issue amid complaints to the authorities by airlines their navigation systems were being jammed.
MUST Major General Thomas Nilsson, the three-star officer in charge of the military intelligence division, told Swedish broadcaster SVT last week that “We can state that the GPS interference continues”, that the interference mainly happens at night, and it may be linked to the Russian military and be part of a “hybrid warfare activity” intended to sow uncertainty and division int he West.
The consequences of GPS errors can be serious, Maj. Gen. Nilsson said, remarking: “We have to look at how it fits together and continue to do an analysis. We can note that this has happened and it is serious because large parts of civil society, not least civil aviation and shipping, are dependent on the GPS system.” On the other hand SVT also quoted a spokesman for Norwegian Air Traffic Control, who had also received reports of interference from aircraft in their skies, saying despite the problem with GPS flights have “a number of different backup systems” which can make up for the loss.
Included in the areas experiencing difficulty is the Suwałki Gap, the small land bridge between Russia’s isolated Kaliningrad exclave and the nearest Moscow-friendly territory of Grodno in Belarus. As reported this week, leaked German military planning documents wargamed the Polish territory known as the Suwałki Gap as a potential location for Russia to start an armed confrontation with NATO.
The extent of the interference is publicly available and can be visualised because commercial airliners compare a variety of navigation data inputs and compare these to their stated GPS position, and then broadcast as part of their transponder data how close to accurate that position is. GPSJAM collates this data and colours the grid depending on the overall level of navigation accuracy on any given day, with green denoting accuracy of over 98 per cent, and red anything less than 90 per cent.
As the GPSJAM service itself notes, low levels of GPS accuracy doesn’t prove jamming is going on, only that GPS accuracy is experiencing a reduction in any given area, but nevertheless “the vast majority of aircraft… with bad GPS accuracy are flying near conflict zones where GPS jamming is known to occur.”
As reported by Breitbart, Russia has previously jammed GPs over Europe for years, including allegedly during a NATO exercise in 2018. Russia denied the charge at the time. Russia has also allegedly had success in jamming GPS in combat itself, including by blinding U.S.-made GPS-guided bombs given to Ukraine last year. Russia itself frequently boasts of the work of its Electronic Warfare brigades and their alleged successes in blocking enemy radio and navigation in posts by its Ministry of Defence.
As previously reported, GPS is ultimately just radio signals and is consequentially easy to spoof or block. Breitbart London in 2022:
…a sophisticated attack can even mimic the satellites and spoof a location, causing the device to believe it is somewhere else.
This is not mere speculation. Even before Russia’s surge in Ukraine, GPS spoofing has been within the technical competence of the more determined sort of university student and the modern, digital navigation equipment of ships transiting the Black Sea mysteriously malfunctioning in the past suggested the Russians have been testing an anti-GPS weapon for some years.
Now war in Ukraine is back, Russia — and quite possibly Ukraine — are jamming GPS and other navigational signals to deprive their enemy of navigation and weapons targeting.
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