A taste of electronic hybrid warfarebetween Saturday and Monday, created interference with the systems in just over 48 hours GPS of 1,614 planes, many of which were commercial, with passengers, which flew first over the Baltic region and southern Sweden, then northern Poland, especially in the western sector close to the border with Belarus and Kaliningrad, the enclave between Poland and Lithuania which formally it belongs to the Russian Federation. And not only. The maps of interference due to high-tech “jamming” and “spoofing” operations, aimed at both the GPS system (a constellation of dozens of American satellites) and the GNSS, have recorded a peak in interference precisely where there is aircraft on maximum alert Born, while it is easy to verify a normal situation in neighboring Belarus, an ally of Moscow. Everything was reported in blogs and online posts that can be consulted by everyone, dedicated to “mapping” the prohibited actions of jammers, the “interfering” equipment on drones or ground vehicles.
Electronic warfare, the Russian Baltic jammer obscures the GPS of 900 planes flying over Kaliningrad: Putin’s new disturbance action
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In Kaliningrad and in the Mediterranean in Cyprus, there are known to be well-equipped positions for the Russians’ electronic hybrid warfare. Among the “targeted” countries are Germany, Latvia and Denmark. But what happens in practice? The risk is reduced, calculated, although potentially catastrophic due to the effects that blinding the GPS reception systems on a plane in flight can cause. James Bond alias Pierce Brosnan knew something about this in the ’97 film with 007, “Tomorrow Never Dies”. The techno-terrorist Henry Gupta manages to trigger the war between China and Great Britain by intercepting and confusing the GPS signal of the frigate HMS Devonshire, and sending it off course in the waters of the South China Sea. And, in fact, a year ago the pilots of the Australian Qantas reported VHS interference from the Chinese fleet in the Eastern Pacific and the South China Sea, via “very high frequency” radio waves. But GPS jamming actions were also observed presumably starting from Chinese war units. The same happened in 2019 to RAF planes taking off from the Cypriot base of Akrotiri. And now these alarms over the skies of Eastern Europe and the Baltic-Scandinavian area.
THE ALARM
“The Russians are very strong in terms of electronic warfare capabilities,” the chief of staff of the Estonian Armed Forces, General Martin Herem, told Bloomberg last January. And a Swedish officer, the same month, explicitly attributed “interference or hybrid warfare” activities to Russia. Forbes, in turn, reported the stories of some pilots flying over the Baltic, saying that it is now customary in certain areas to switch from GPS navigation to different systems, for example to inertial navigation. The Ops Group, an association of pilots, confirms that in the area the aircraft are “targeted” by false signals, which confuse the instruments and, therefore, the pilots, to the point of compromising the “navigation ability”. This would not be traditional jamming, but something more refined, GPS spoofing. According to Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, the goal of hybrid warfare is to create an “atmosphere of threat and a sense of helplessness in society.” The idea of being at the mercy of state terrorism, which blinds and confuses planes and is capable of causing disasters if desired (if the pilot believes he is in a different position from the real one) or border “accidents”. The classic provocation of military espionage. Melanie Garson, professor of international security at the British UCL, defines hybrid, electronic warfare as “the mother of all inventions, and the Russians – she explains – know how to use it in concrete terms and it is worrying, because NATO does not yet have the same capacity”.
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