Norway is among northern European NATO members that have reported a spike in GPS (global positioning system) navigation disturbances amid speculation that Russia is responsible.
Jamming of the signals used by pilots, motorists and emergency response services is of such a concern that Norwegian authorities have reportedly raised the issue with Russia’s main intelligence agency the FSB.
Ed Mortimer, vice president of government affairs at geolocation services company NextNav, told Newsweek that the use of jamming is a “tool in the toolkit” for conflicts, which Russia had been deploying even before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
GPS jamming reduces positioning accuracy and could cause the receivers in the cockpit of civilian planes to lose positioning, although experts have said the recent spike in disturbances over the Baltic Sea does not threaten aircraft safety.
However, European countries near Russia have also expressed concern at the heightened levels of disturbances. This coincides with the Kremlin’s standoff against the West over the war in Ukraine and the enlargement of NATO, although there is no evidence that Moscow is jamming GPS systems on purpose. Newsweek emailed the Russian Defense Ministry for comment on Saturday.
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On Saturday, the GPSjam website, which maps jamming across the world, showed high levels of GPS interference over much of northern Poland, Scandinavia and the Baltic States, all of which are NATO members.
“Poland, Sweden, and Germany absolutely blasted by (presumably Russian) GPS jamming in the past day. Again,” wrote GPS Jam administrator John Wiseman on X (formerly Twitter), next to a still of his website’s map of the region.
On February 25, the Norwegian Communications Authority (Nkom) said there had been 44 disturbances so far this year—or almost one a day. Airline pilots and civilian air ambulances flying along the coast of Norway’s northern Finnmark region reported GPS jamming, the Norwegian online newspaper The Barents Observer reported.
Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that GPS jamming blamed on Russia has increased “significantly” since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. There were 294 recorded days of disturbances in 2023, compared with 122 days the previous year, and only 18 days in 2021.
John-Eivind Velure, a director at Nkom, said that disturbances are recorded very high up above the ground and so are “not critical for aircraft, which have other systems for navigation.”
“Had it been closer to the ground—like at helicopter altitude—it would have been much more serious,” Velure told Dagbladet, according to a translation of the Norwegian.
“Signal interference from Russia in the High North is probably not about it being aimed at Norway specifically,” Velure added. “Most likely, the signals are there to protect something in Russia, but then they spill over to Norway.”
Finnmark Police District Chief of Police Ellen Katrine Hætta told the Barents Observer that her department has raised GPS jamming with the FSB, which said “they would look into the matter.”
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) issued its first Safety Information Bulletin (SIB) about GPS interference in March 2022. This was updated in November of 2023, adding that “GNSS (global navigation satellite system) jamming and/or spoofing has shown further increase in the severity of its impact.”
Spoofing involves broadcasting counterfeit or “fake” signals that can make receivers think that they have the correct signal but lead them to compute incorrect position, navigation and timing (PNT) information.
Mortimer told Newsweek that GNSS interference has become a weapon by both state and non-state actors as a way to cause harm without openly declaring war.
“We have seen these interferences in the Ukraine conflict over the last several years. They have intensified, no doubt,” Mortimer said. “Jamming and spoofing now have become a tool in the toolkit for these types of conflicts, and that is a concern.
“It is certainly taking a while for governments to respond. We need to see resiliency and bring on other systems that can be complementary and provide that resiliency so that, if if there is a GPS or GNSS interference, those other technologies that can kind of fill the void.”
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.