GPS malfunctions recorded in recent years in the Scandinavian-Baltic region have seen a surge since the end of 2023, causing significant inconveniences. Russia is probably behind these phenomena, but it may not be a voluntary involvement
05/05/2024
“If someone turns off your headlights while you’re driving at night, it becomes dangerous. The situation in the Baltic region, close to the Russian borders, is becoming too dangerous to ignore.” Thus the Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergisas reported by Financial Timescommented on the recent increase in GPS system disturbances recorded between Scandinavia and the Baltics.
The most recent accident was recorded only a few days ago, and involved two Finnair aircraft flying on the Helsinki-Tartu route which had to reverse course due to the severity of the disturbance. Following these events, the Finnish flag carrier has decided to temporarily suspend traffic on the affected route. But this is only the latest in a series of similar events recorded in recent months, events which have raised concerns about flight safety in the region. GPS signals in Finland and the northernmost regions of Norway have suffered disruptions, with airliners forced to employ manual navigation, while smartphone geolocation and mapping services were found to be malfunctioning.
Suspicions obviously fall on Moscow, and in particular on a signal jamming tool used for military reasons. While there has been no official confirmation on the location of the jammer, the open source intelligence researcher Markus Jonsson, which monitors GPS disturbances in the Baltic Sea region, would have identified the location of the suspected jammer halfway between the city of Narva, located on the border between Estonia and Russia, and St. Petersburg. The Financial Times also reports a Western official’s comment that the Russian military is likely using these jammers to “try to protect Kaliningrad from potential Ukrainian drone attacks.” We are currently trying to understand whether the recorded disturbance constitutes an intentional aggression, or is just an accidental consequence of military activity. An important distinction to understand how to calibrate a possible response. “A commercial airline being forced to abandon a route due to GPS interference is no small thing, but it’s no act of war either. Indeed, Finland, Estonia and other countries in the Baltic Sea region are likely to struggle to prove that the Russian government was behind the interference and that it was intentional. Without such evidence, any retaliation against Russia would be reckless,” he comments Elizabeth Braw in a piece published by Center for European Policy Analysis.
In recent months, as reported by Braw, the GPS disturbance has intensified, affecting tens of thousands of flights and even some ships. In the days immediately following Christmas 2023, interference moved from the typical green band, which indicates it is less than 2% of traffic, to the red band, which indicates it is greater than 10%.
It is not the first time that similar problems have come to light: already in September 2017, in conjunction with the carrying out of the Zapad-17 exercise conducted by the Russian armed forces in the westernmost regions of the Federation, and again during the exercise Trident Juncture conducted in Norway in October 2018 by the Atlantic Alliance, phenomena mirroring the most recent ones had been reported. Thus substantiating the hypothesis of the military origin of the disorder.
But NATO is preparing to react, according to the dictates of resilience mentioned in Article 3 of the North Atlantic Treaty: “The parties will work together to develop and maintain their capacity to resist armed attacks through mutual aid and self-help”. In part this is already happening, but it is necessary for private sector participation to reach a new level, so as to improve civil and military reaction capabilities in the more or less near future.
