Thousands of ships and aircraft crossing the Baltic Sea have been fed false coordinates since 2022, and the signals doing it are still active.
The Mystery in 5 Lines
- Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, GPS signals across the Baltic Sea have been systematically jammed and spoofed on a scale unprecedented in peacetime Europe.
- The interference affects all four major satellite constellations simultaneously: GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou.
- Ships appear on navigational screens in the middle of airports. Aircraft lose positional accuracy mid-approach. Civilian airlines have cancelled routes entirely.
- Researchers have triangulated two primary source zones: the Kaliningrad exclave and the St. Petersburg coast, both hosting known Russian electronic warfare units.
- The question that remains actively contested among experts: is this deliberate hybrid warfare, or collateral from defensive systems protecting Russian territory?
The Mystery
Imagine you are the captain of a cargo vessel crossing the southern Baltic on a clear October morning. Your navigational screen shows your position with its usual confidence. Then, silently, without any alarm or visible malfunction, your GPS receiver starts lying to you. Your AIS transponder, which broadcasts your location to every other ship and coast guard in range, begins telling the world that you are parked on an airport runway. You have not moved. The sea is calm. But according to every satellite your system can find, you are somewhere you are not.
This is not a hypothetical. It has happened to vessels operating in the Baltic hundreds of times since 2022. The phenomenon has grounded commercial flights, forced warships to abandon navigation protocols, and pushed fourteen European nations to sign a joint letter warning that international shipping safety is under active threat. The source of the signals has been tracked to within a kilometer of known military installations. And yet, as of mid-2025, the jamming continues.
When the World Noticed
The disruptions began quietly after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but they reached public attention in stages. Latvia logged 26 cases of interference in 2022. By 2024, that number had risen to 820 confirmed incidents in a single year, according to Latvia's Electronic Communications Office. The acceleration was not gradual. It was a near-vertical climb.
The episode that forced the story into mainstream news came in April 2024. Finnair, Finland's national carrier, suspended its daily service to Tartu, Estonia, after two consecutive flights were forced to turn back to Helsinki. Tartu Airport relied exclusively on GPS for its approach systems, and the interference made landing unsafe. Flights to an Estonian city were cancelled because a radio signal from somewhere to the east was deceiving the navigation computers of modern aircraft.
That same month, a Royal Air Force aircraft carrying the British Defence Secretary experienced GPS jamming near Kaliningrad. A Downing Street statement noted that it is "not unusual" for aircraft to experience such interference in that corridor. Not unusual. The normalisation contained in that phrase is worth sitting with.
What Researchers Have Confirmed
Between June and November 2024, researchers from Gdynia Maritime University and GPSPATRON operated sensors roughly 120 kilometres east of Kaliningrad and documented 84 hours of confirmed GNSS interference. In October alone, that figure reached 29 hours, with some individual events stretching to seven continuous hours. During those windows, positional errors jumped from the standard 3 to 5 metres to over 35 metres, a margin that becomes acutely dangerous in confined shipping lanes or on final approach to an airport.
The interference did not target one satellite system. It hit all four major constellations at once, which is a telling detail. Jamming GPS alone leaves receivers able to cross-check against Galileo or GLONASS. Jamming all four simultaneously forces the receiver to accept the spoofed GPS signal as the only available reference. Researchers from the Gdynia team described this as a "spoofing-jamming combination," a deliberate technique designed to monopolise what the navigation system believes.
By late 2025, a research vessel called Imor deployed specialised interference detectors in waters near the Polish-Kaliningrad maritime boundary. The patterns it recorded pointed to something more organised than a single transmitter. Multiple transmitters, operating across different frequency bands, with different generations of equipment, turning on and off in synchronised windows. The researchers concluded that what the Baltic is dealing with is a distributed, multi-node electronic warfare network, not a single ground station. Some signals carry the spectral fingerprint of analog-era equipment. Others are more refined. Together, they function as one system.
Two ground locations have been triangulated with approximately one-kilometre precision: the Okunevo antenna facility on the Kaliningrad coast, and a second cluster near the St. Petersburg area. Both sit adjacent to documented Russian electronic warfare units and military antenna sites.
Timeline: From Isolated Reports to Diplomatic Action
| Year |
Event |
| 2022 |
Latvia records 26 GNSS interference cases; Baltic jamming begins correlating with Ukraine war start |
| 2023 |
Sustained jamming events spread; EASA issues Safety Information Bulletins for Baltic airspace |
| March 2024 |
UK Defence Secretary's RAF aircraft experiences GPS jamming near Kaliningrad |
| April 2024 |
Finnair suspends Tartu flights; Estonia's Foreign Minister calls it a hybrid attack |
| Oct 2024 |
29 hours of interference recorded in a single month; mobile maritime jamming vessels confirmed |
| Dec 2025 |
Gdynia/GPSPATRON research vessel confirms distributed multi-node electronic warfare network |
| Jan 2026 |
14 Baltic and North Sea nations sign open letter; Latvia logs 820 incidents in 2024 alone |
Competing Theories
There are two dominant interpretations of what is happening, and they lead to very different political conclusions.
The first is that this is deliberate hybrid warfare. Estonia's Foreign Minister described it as "a hybrid action to disrupt our lives and to break all kinds of international agreements." Under this reading, Russia is using GPS interference as a low-cost tool to harass NATO members, test the resilience of civilian infrastructure, and exercise electronic warfare capabilities without technically crossing the threshold of armed conflict. It is coercive pressure applied through the electromagnetic spectrum.
The second theory, held by some researchers including Jaroslaw Cydejko at Gdynia Maritime University, is that the interference is largely collateral damage. Russia, fighting a drone war in Ukraine, needs to protect Kaliningrad and its broader military infrastructure from Ukrainian drone incursions. The jamming systems are defensive, not designed to harm Baltic civilians. The Baltic states are simply close enough to catch the spillover. Under this reading, there is no deliberate campaign against European aviation and shipping. There is a war happening, and physics does not respect national borders.
Cydejko adds a further wrinkle: Gdansk, a Polish city well beyond line-of-sight from Kaliningrad, still experiences intermittent interference. His hypothesis is atmospheric. The jammer may be operating continuously, but local weather conditions occasionally allow the signal to travel farther than intended, reaching receivers that should be out of range. If that is right, it complicates any diplomatic or legal response considerably.
Reality Check
Russia has maintained complete official silence on the matter. When Baltic states filed complaints with the International Civil Aviation Organization, Russian officials dismissed them as politically motivated. That silence does not resolve the question of intent, but it does eliminate the possibility of negotiating a technical solution through normal channels.
Evidence For and Against Each Theory
Theory A: Deliberate Hybrid Warfare
Evidence in favour: The synchronized timing of multi-node transmitters points to coordinated operational control, not accidental spillover. The interference escalated sharply after 2022 and has intensified since. Mobile maritime jamming from vessels operating inside international waters, confirmed in October 2024, suggests active deployment choices, not passive defensive systems. The UK Defence Secretary's aircraft was affected, a high-profile event that would have strategic signalling value if intentional.
Evidence against: A deliberate campaign against NATO civilian aviation would carry serious escalation risks. Russia has not formally claimed any operational benefit from disrupting Finnair routes to Estonia. No direct link between specific jamming events and Russian political or military objectives has been publicly established.
Theory B: Defensive Spillover
Evidence in favour: Jamming near active military facilities is a documented global practice. Russia does face Ukrainian drone threats to Kaliningrad and the St. Petersburg area. The atmospheric-propagation hypothesis for distant interference events is scientifically plausible.
Evidence against: The Imor research vessel confirmed mobile maritime jamming from ships actively navigating Baltic international waters. That is not a fixed defensive system protecting a city. It is a mobile platform choosing when and where to operate. That operational choice is hard to characterise as purely defensive.
What Remains Unsolved
Even with the Okunevo triangulation and the Imor vessel data, several core questions have no confirmed answers.
First, what specific orders govern when the system activates? The synchronised on-off behaviour of the multi-node network implies central control and pre-set activation criteria. Whether those criteria are tied to drone activity, military exercises, or something else entirely is not known.
Second, has the spoofing caused any unreported near-misses in aviation? The 5th percentile of aircraft tracked in the October 2024 data showed complete collapse in positional accuracy. Whether any of those aircraft were in vulnerable phases of flight, and what happened next, is not publicly documented.
Third, there is the unresolved question of legal jurisdiction. The Baltic Sea, except for the Gulf of Finland near St. Petersburg, lies within the Exclusive Economic Zones of NATO members. Under UNCLOS, coastal states have enforcement powers there. But enforcing maritime law against mobile jamming vessels operating near or from Russian-flagged ships has no obvious procedural path. The January 2026 open letter from fourteen nations signalled intent to enforce, but the mechanism remains undefined.
And finally: the atmospheric propagation question. If some of the longer-range events are actually weather-dependent rather than intentional, then removing the source, even if politically possible, would not fully explain or predict the pattern of disruptions. The physics of radio propagation in the Baltic's variable atmospheric conditions remains an active area of investigation.
Historical Note
GPS jamming in conflict zones is not new. The United States and Israel have both deployed GNSS jamming around sensitive sites. What is unusual about the Baltic case is the sustained, multi-year, multi-constellation interference affecting civilian aviation and commercial shipping in some of Europe's busiest waterways, with no formal acknowledgment from the responsible party and no established precedent for international enforcement.
What Most People Miss About This Story
The coverage of Baltic GPS jamming tends to frame it as a security story, which it is. But the deeper issue is structural, and it is one that existed long before any Russian jammer was switched on.
We built an entire layer of global logistics on a signal that travels 20,000 kilometres from space and arrives at your receiver at roughly 20 watts, about the strength of a dim light bulb. It is extraordinarily easy to disrupt. The reason GPS spoofing and jamming is so effective is not because Russia has developed some sophisticated new weapon. It is because civilian maritime and aviation infrastructure progressively stripped out its backup navigation systems over the past three decades in the name of efficiency.
Tartu Airport became a liability not because its GPS receiver was weak, but because it had no alternative approach system. It was designed for a world where GPS simply worked. That assumption held for 30 years. It stopped holding in 2022.
There is also a comparison worth making that rarely appears in the standard coverage. In the South China Sea, China has been accused of GPS spoofing to manipulate vessel positions near disputed islands. In the Persian Gulf, over 3,000 vessels were reportedly disrupted in a two-week window in June 2025 according to Windward AI data. The Baltic is not an isolated case. It is the most documented case of a global pattern: state actors discovering that the navigation layer of the global economy is softer than anyone planned for.
What this means practically is that the solution is not only diplomatic. Even if the jamming stopped tomorrow, the vulnerability would remain. R-Mode Baltic, the EU-funded land-based backup navigation system being developed by Germany, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Estonia, is the structural answer. It uses existing coastal beacons rather than satellites. Ships equipped with R-Mode receivers would calculate position by measuring distances to multiple land stations, not by trusting a signal from space that can be overridden by a transmitter on a ship in international waters. That project is currently expanding toward the eastern Baltic, where interference has been most severe.
The mystery of who is doing this and precisely why may eventually be resolved. The more pressing question, which does not depend on that resolution, is why civilian infrastructure in one of the world's busiest maritime corridors was built with a single point of failure and what it will take to actually fix it.
What to Watch Over the Next Five Years
The R-Mode Baltic project will be the clearest indicator of whether European nations are treating this as a temporary security problem or a permanent structural one. If it gets full funding and regional adoption, that is a real response. If it stalls in committee while diplomatic letters continue to circulate, the vulnerability continues.
Watch Latvia specifically. It has the most granular public data on interference incidents, and the trajectory from 26 cases in 2022 to 820 in 2024 is a usable baseline. Whether that number rises, plateaus, or falls will say more about what is actually happening operationally than any diplomatic statement from either side.
The mobile maritime jamming dimension is the one that deserves the most attention. Fixed installations can be monitored and, in theory, negotiated over. Ships that can move, activate, and relocate are a different category of problem. If the Baltic coastal states develop the legal framework and technical capacity to intercept and inspect suspected jamming vessels under UNCLOS, that would be a significant shift in how this kind of electronic warfare is treated under international law. So far, the intent is there. The mechanism is not.
And keep an eye on whether a serious aviation incident is formally attributed to GNSS interference in the region. Estonia's Foreign Minister said in 2024 that the jamming is dangerous enough that a crash is a matter of when, not if. That is a strong claim. If it proves wrong over the next five years, it will partly vindicate the argument that backup systems and pilot training have been sufficient. If it proves right, the entire conversation about enforcement, attribution, and liability will change overnight.
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Santhosh Vishwamitra
Web Developer and Founder of Vishwamitra Chronicles, launched in February 2026.
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