Sunday evening. A plane with the President of the European Commission on board is approaching a landing in Bulgaria. At a crucial moment, minutes before touching down on the runway, the pilots lose access to the essential navigation tool of the 21st century – the GPS signal.
The systems that modern aviation relies on go silent and the crew has to resort to older, ground-based technology. This was no ordinary malfunction. What the Bulgarian government openly calls a deliberate cyber attack by Russia was a digital warning shot.
This incident, although happily concluded, is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of a much wider phenomenon – a silent, invisible war being waged on the airwaves over Europe, in which the security and technological sovereignty of an entire continent is at stake.
Warfare 2.0 – what is radio-electronic warfare (WRE)?
For most of us, war is associated with images familiar from newsreels. However, the modern battlefield is increasingly moving into the electromagnetic spectrum.
A key element of this transformation is Radio Electronic Warfare (RAW), i.e. any military action aimed at controlling, disrupting or deceiving an adversary’s electronic systems. In the context of satellite navigation, Russian activities usually take two forms.
The first, more violent, is jamming. It can be likened to trying to drown out a conversation by turning up loud music. Powerful terrestrial transmitters emit strong ‘noise’ on GPS frequencies, preventing receivers in planes, ships or our phones from picking up the weak signal from orbiting satellites.
The second, much more sophisticated and dangerous method is spoofing (falsification). This is no longer jamming, but whispering false information. Instead of blocking the signal, WRE systems send out crafted, false data that tricks the receiver. As a result, the aircraft ‘thinks’ it is several tens of kilometres away and the ship at sea is given a course that leads straight into the shoals.
The aim of both is digital paralysis: to blind and stun the opponent, to undermine trust in technology and to demonstrate the ability to take control of the invisible infrastructure on which we all depend.
The Baltic Sea as a testing ground
The epicentre of this silent war is right on our borders. Since the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine in 2022, the Baltic region – and Poland, Finland and the Baltic states in particular – has become the scene of massive and prolonged GPS signal disruptions.
This is confirmed not only by official warnings from governments, but also by data from public air traffic monitoring systems, which regularly show huge ‘holes’ in satellite navigation coverage.
Russia’s Kaliningrad region is identified as the likely source of most interference. This heavily militarised exclave is saturated with some of the world’s most modern WRE systems, such as Krasukh-4 and Murmansk-BN, capable of disrupting signals over a radius of hundreds of kilometres.
The Baltic has become a testing ground for Russia to test its capabilities in real-world conditions while probing NATO defence systems.
Digital ‘maskirovka’: Why is Russia doing it?
These operations are not accidental, but are part of Russia’s hybrid warfare strategy, known as maskirovka – the art of deception and concealment of true intentions. The objectives of these operations are multidimensional:
1 NATO defence testing: Russia is testing how the Alliance responds to disruption. Do civilian and military pilots have alternative procedures? How resilient are the defence systems and how quickly can they identify the source of an attack?
2. a demonstration of strength: A clear signal sent to the West: “We control your skies and sea, even without a single gunshot”. It is a form of intimidation and power projection.
3 Creating a protective ‘bubble’: WRE systems create an invisible shield around strategic facilities in Kaliningrad to protect them from possible attack with GPS-guided precision munitions.
4 Sowing chaos and uncertainty: Every disrupted flight and every ship forced to change course undermines confidence in the Western technology on which global logistics and transport are based.
From the cockpit to critical infrastructure – what’s at stake?
The impact of these actions goes far beyond minor inconveniences. In civil aviation, as the incident with Ursula von der Leyen’s plane showed, passenger safety is at stake. In maritime transport, where 90% of global trade is carried by sea, signal falsification can lead to disasters.
However, the real threat is even deeper. GPS is not just about location, it is also a global time standard, crucial for synchronising mobile networks, stock market transactions and energy systems. A deliberate, massive attack on this infrastructure could have cascading, hard-to-predict effects on the entire economy.
In this context, a fundamental question resurfaced after the Bulgarian incident: Can the European army rely on GPS for drone or missile guidance at this point?
The effectiveness of ‘smart’ munitions, the backbone of modern armed forces, comes into question when the enemy is able to take away their ‘eyes and ears’.
An arms race in the ether
Electronic warfare is no longer a theory, but an everyday reality at Europe’s gates. It is a quiet front where our technological resilience is being tested.
In response, the West is stepping up work to make its own systems more resilient – from strengthening the encrypted signals of Europe’s Galileo system to investing in constellations of satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) to provide redundancy.
The old iron curtain was constructed of steel and concrete. The new digital curtain of the 21st century may be woven from invisible electromagnetic waves, effectively cutting off regions from key technologies. The race for dominance in the ether is already underway.
