Aviation safety and geopolitics collided when multiple flights carrying high-ranking European and UK officials were hit by suspected Russian GPS jamming. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s flight to Bulgaria experienced a severe GPS outage, forcing a manual landing. EU officials immediately pointed the finger at Moscow, calling the incident “blatant interference.” Around the same time, UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps’s jet lost GPS and communications while flying near Russia’s heavily militarized Kaliningrad enclave, an area long associated with electronic warfare testing.
These incidents underscore a growing pattern of Russian electronic warfare tactics in the Baltic region and beyond. Russia has invested heavily in advanced jamming and spoofing systems such as Pole-21, Krasukha, and Murmansk-BN, capable of degrading navigation, communication, and targeting systems. While jamming simply blocks GPS signals, spoofing is more dangerous—it feeds aircraft false positional data, potentially misleading pilots or corrupting onboard systems. Reports show spoofing incidents rose 500% last year, with thousands of cases logged across Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in early 2025 alone.
For Russia, GPS interference serves multiple purposes: disrupting military drones in Ukraine, intimidating Western officials, signaling anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities, and normalizing hybrid warfare tactics short of direct conflict. By targeting flights of figures like von der Leyen and Shapps, Moscow sends a chilling political message while gathering valuable data on Western responses.
Although pilots are trained to navigate without GPS—using inertial systems, VOR/DME, ILS, and dead reckoning—the loss of satellite navigation increases workload, reduces precision, and introduces new risks, especially in poor weather or congested airspace. Spoofing, in particular, can trigger false ground proximity warnings, raising the danger of catastrophic misjudgments.
In response, the EU and UK are accelerating countermeasures. Brussels is considering boosting satellite-based detection, expanding low Earth orbit monitoring, and even pushing sanctions against Russian electronic warfare units. The UK is investing millions into anti-jamming projects like Project Wayfind. Airlines are also adapting—avoiding known hot zones, upgrading receivers, and training crews to detect and respond to interference.
With about 1,500 flights a day experiencing GPS disruption globally, experts warn that electronic warfare in the skies is becoming a normalized risk. As Russia continues to weaponize the radio spectrum, the EU, NATO, and airlines face the urgent task of hardening aviation navigation systems and securing the skies against the invisible threat of signal interference.
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