Russia's GPS war on Europe
Russian military satellites have been disrupting GPS signals across Europe since 2019 — revealing a structural dependency that Moscow appears to be exploiting as a tool of strategic pressure.
At a Glance
Researchers have established that satellites from Russia’s EKS military constellation — designed to detect ballistic missile launches and nuclear explosions — are responsible for at least three GPS disruption incidents in Europe, out of 75 incidents documented by two research teams since 2019. Reported disruptions across the broader Baltic region, including aviation and maritime, number in the tens of thousands.
The number of ground-based jamming antennas in Kaliningrad, Russia’s military exclave on the Baltic Sea between Lithuania and Poland, reportedly surged from three in early 2025 to 36 today, with a range of 280 miles covering the Baltic states, most of Poland, and portions of Scandinavia.
Six EU member states filed a complaint with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in June 2025 demanding Russia comply with its international obligations — with no effective sanctions to date.
This image is used for illustrative purposes only.
A threat from orbit
For years, Russian GPS jamming was a ground-level problem: fixed antennas, a localized interference signal, a range limited to a few hundred miles. That model has now been superseded.
Two research teams — one American, one Spanish — established in early June 2026 that satellites belonging to Russia’s EKS military constellation, built to detect ballistic missile launches and nuclear explosions, are emitting on frequencies close enough to GPS to disrupt civilian systems at continental scale. In at least three of the 75 incidents the researchers documented since 2019, the jamming signal originated from orbit. Unlike ground-based interference, which can persist continuously, these orbital disruptions are typically brief — lasting seconds — but their geographic reach is incomparably larger. The systems affected include the U.S. GPS network, China’s BeiDou, and Europe’s Galileo navigation system. Russia’s own GLONASS was unaffected in each case.
The difference in scale is fundamental. A ground-based jamming source is limited to line of sight. A satellite operates across an entire continent. What Kaliningrad’s antennas can do within 280 miles, a military satellite could potentially do across all of Central Europe simultaneously — a qualitatively different strategic capability.
The question of intent remains unresolved. Russia’s primary stated purpose for EKS satellites — early nuclear warning — is considered too critical for analysts to believe Moscow would attach a secondary jamming function to it. Pavel Podvig, director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project, an organization that tracks Russia’s strategic capabilities, has judged it unlikely that Moscow is deliberately using these satellites to jam civilian navigation. The researchers themselves remain cautious: the satellites emit near GPS frequencies, but whether the resulting interference is intentional has not been formally established. The European Union conducted its own investigation into the orbital incidents — and classified the results.
Kaliningrad: the jamming hub on Europe’s doorstep
Alongside this orbital dimension, Russia’s ground-based jamming infrastructure is expanding at an alarming pace. Kaliningrad — a Russian military exclave on the Baltic Sea, sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland — now hosts what appears to be a rapidly scaled jamming apparatus. The number of jamming antennas reportedly jumped from three in early 2025 to 36 today, extending their coverage radius to 280 miles. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, much of Poland, and portions of Finland and Sweden now fall within range.
The effects reach everyday civilian life. In Klaipeda, a Lithuanian city roughly 30 miles from the exclave, real-time bus schedules go offline during peak interference — the vehicles rely on GPS for tracking. Mobile networks near Kaliningrad are also degraded. In Sweden, the Transport Agency logged 733 GPS jamming incidents in 2025, up from just 55 for all of 2023 — and those figures capture only formally reported aviation cases, not the far larger volume of maritime and infrastructure disruptions recorded across the Baltic region.
This is not merely a nuisance. It is the systematic erosion of trust in civilian infrastructure that three decades of GPS dependency have made both essential and invisible — and therefore acutely vulnerable.
Aviation as a political target
Commercial and government aircraft have been at the center of the most documented incidents. In March 2024, the plane carrying Grant Shapps, then serving as Britain’s Defense Secretary, experienced GPS jamming near Kaliningrad on a return flight from Poland. In 2025, the aircraft carrying Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission — the EU’s executive arm — had to land using paper charts after a disruption en route to Bulgaria. A Spanish military jet carrying then-Defense Minister Margarita Robles experienced a similar disruption near the exclave that same year.
On May 25, 2026, British Defense Secretary John Healey was the latest high-profile target, his Royal Air Force aircraft losing GPS connectivity for three hours on a return flight from Estonia, where he had met with British troops deployed under NATO’s enhanced forward presence. Pilots resorted to alternative navigation methods for the entire flight.
Aircraft are equipped with backup inertial navigation systems, which calculate position from movement since takeoff. But these systems drift over time and require periodic GPS recalibration to remain reliable — making them a short-term workaround, not a credible long-duration alternative.
These incidents are not navigational accidents. They are capability demonstrations, delivered to senior political figures inside sovereign European airspace.
A deliberate strategy, a fragmented response
Analysts see in the pattern a coherent Russian posture, not a series of unrelated technical incidents. GPS jamming has intensified in three distinct phases: the first signals appeared in 2017, a sharp escalation followed the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and a further surge came in early 2024 after Ukrainian drones began striking deep inside Russian territory. Analysts suggest the dual logic would be to degrade Ukrainian drone guidance systems while simultaneously stress-testing the GPS dependencies of NATO member states — though no public evidence formally establishes deliberate intent behind the EKS orbital emissions specifically.
Moscow’s response to these accusations has been consistent: denial, paired with accusations of Western provocation. Russia’s embassy in Washington declined to comment on the incidents documented by the researchers.
What Moscow could be accumulating, whether by design or as a byproduct of its military posture, is a precise map of Western infrastructure vulnerabilities — and evidence that those vulnerabilities can be activated at scale and at will.
Europe’s response, meanwhile, has remained fragmented. Six countries — Sweden, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland — brought the matter before the ICAO in June 2025, arguing Russia is violating international obligations under ICAO rules and International Telecommunication Union (ITU) regulations prohibiting harmful interference with civil navigation. The jamming has intensified since. The EU classified its own investigation results. No effective sanctions or coordinated deterrence mechanism has been imposed or made public.
GPS is not just a navigation tool. It synchronizes power grids, mobile networks, and financial systems. What Moscow is testing over the Baltic is, in effect, the conditions for remote infrastructure paralysis — without firing a single shot.
The bottom line
Europe spent three decades building critical infrastructure on the assumption that a U.S.-operated satellite signal would always be available. Russian jamming does not destroy that infrastructure — it reveals how completely it depends on a signal that a third party can degrade from space, whether deliberately or as a consequence of military systems operating near civilian frequencies. The question is no longer how to respond to the current disruptions. It is whether Europe can afford to keep building its security on foundations it does not control.
Sources: TV5 Monde · Reuters · BBC · Le Monde