Russia accused of meddling in the GPS systems of Baltic Sea countries

Finland‘s national carrier Finnair announced on Monday that none of its aircraft will be landing at Tartu airport, Estonia’s second-largest, over the next month due to a rise in incidents involving the airport’s GPS signal in the Baltic Sea region.

Tartu airport is one of the few in the region that still uses GPS signals to help land aircraft; if the signal is lost, it is impossible for aircraft to land safely. Last week, two Finnair flights approaching Tartu had to turn back at the last minute and return to Helsinki because they were unsure if they could rely on the airport’s GPS.

Estonia quickly accused Russia of involvement. Moscow “knows very well that the interference they are causing is very dangerous for our air traffic”, Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said on Monday.

Russia has been accused of being behind a surge in incidents linked to GPS signal interference over the last year or so. Sweden has even called on NATO to act.

“About 46,000 aircraft in total [flying in and out of Britain] have logged problems with GPS over the Baltic Sea” since last August, The Sun reported last month, based on a joint analysis of flight logs with the GPSJAM.org website, which tracks GPS interference.

Tried-and-true techniques   

A plane carrying British Defence Secretary Grant Schapps suffered a GPS system failure over Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania, in March.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency even held a summit in January to discuss the rise in GPS-related incidents.

“GPS signals have been jammed since the early 1990s,” said Alexandre Vautravers, an arms specialist and editor of the Swiss Military Review.

The techniques involved are nothing new. Russia is suspected of engaging in large-scale GPS jamming and “spoofing” in the Baltic Sea and around the Denmark Strait.

The most basic form of interference consists of “transmitting on the same frequency as the GPS beacons, but with a stronger signal [to] prevent the devices from obtaining the information transmitted from the GPS satellites to calculate their position”, Vautravers explained.

The next stage – known as “spoofing” – involves “manipulating the radio signals in order to deceive the user about their location or the time transmitted by the satellites”, said Tegg Westbrook, a researcher at the University of Stavanger who has written on GPS interference techniques.

Russia has been accused of carrying out both types of attack in the Baltic Sea region.

Ramping up with the war in Ukraine

This is not the first time this part of Europe has seen disputes over the airwaves.

“Since the 1970s and the Cold War, a full-scale electronic war has been waged there,” said Vautravers. “The passage through the Gulf of Finland (from St Petersburg to the Baltic Sea) has become a crossroads of very important geostrategic interests.” Both Russian and NATO forces conduct daily military exercises and manoeuvres in the area.

Russia is particularly active in this region because “the Russian authorities consider the Baltic states to be an integral part of their historic sphere of influence. Moscow also did not like Estonia’s specialisation in cyber security and has decided to step up its activities in the region since Finland’s accession to NATO (in April 2023)”, said David Stupples, a navigation systems and radio signals specialist at City, University of London.

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