GPS

Sept. 1 (UPI) — Russia is suspected of interfering with the Global Positioning System of a jet carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the European Union said Monday

She was in a chartered jet Sunday headed from Poland to southern Bulgaria as part of a tour of eastern EU countries, including “front line” states of Latvia, Finland, Estonia, Poland, Lithuania and Romania bordering Russia and Belarus. She was expected to discuss defense readiness as part of the tour.

Bulgaria borders Romania and is 1,000 miles from western Russia.

Despite no functional GPS, the plane landed safely at its intended airport in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, though pilots relied on paper maps, the Financial Times reported.

Von der Leyen, accompanied by Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov, visited an arms producer in Sopot.

On Monday, she traveled to Lithuania and Romania.

“We have received information from the Bulgarian authorities that they suspect that this was due to blatant interference by Russia,” Arianna Podesta, deputy spokesperson of the commission, said in a statement obtained by Politico.

“This incident underlines the urgency of the president’s current trip to frontline member states, where she has seen firsthand the everyday threats from Russia and its proxies.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Bulgaria’s information was “incorrect.”

Bulgaria’s government explained how the plane landed at the airport.

“Air Traffic Services immediately proposed an alternative landing approach using ground-based navigation aids [Instrument Landing System],” the Bulgarian government said in a news release. “The ground-based navigation aids used in Bulgaria are independent of GPS systems. We further clarify that there was no need to divert the flight.”

Without correct GPS information, there is a risk of colliding with other planes or unintentionally flying into the ground, water or other object.

“Threats and intimidation are a regular component of Russia’s hostile actions,” the European Commission said, adding they would “ramp up our defense capabilities and support for Ukraine.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, GPS jamming has worsened, Cyrille Rosay, a senior cybersecurity expert at the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, told the BBC.

The BBC reported no proven link has yet been established between Russia and GPS jamming.

Bulgaria, which was a satellite state in the Soviet Union with Russia until the collapse in 1989, has had a “noticeable increase” in GPS incidents, the nation’s Air Traffic Services Authority said.

In March 2024, a British air force plane carrying Defense Secretary Grant Shapps had its GPS signal jammed while flying close to Russia’s Kaliningrad between Poland and Lithuania. Legitimate signals are replaced with fake ones, indicating an incorrect location.

“They have gone from isolated incidents to being normalized,” Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Program, told the BBC. “No one has been willing or able” to convince Moscow to stop an expanding “campaign of interference.”

Airlines operating around the Baltic coast in the last few years in three countries — Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — have reported tens of thousands of jamming incidents.

The navigation system of a plane carrying Ursula von der Leyen was disrupted due to suspected Russian interference, the European Commission has said.

A spokesperson said the “GPS jamming” happened while the Commission president was about to arrive in southern Bulgaria on Sunday, but she still landed safely.

They added: “We have received information from the Bulgarian authorities that they suspect that this was due to blatant interference by Russia.”

The Financial Times, citing unnamed officials, reported that von der Leyen’s plane had to land at Plovdiv Airport with the pilots using paper maps.

The European Commission said “threats and intimidation are a regular component of Russia’s hostile actions” and that the incident would reinforce its commitment to “ramp up our defence capabilities and support for Ukraine”.

The EU will deploy additional satellites into low Earth orbit with the aim of bolstering its ability to detect GPS interference, the bloc’s Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius said following the incident.

The Bulgarian government confirmed that, during the flight, “the satellite signal transmitting information to the plane’s GPS navigation system was neutralised”.

The statement continued: “To ensure the flight’s safety, air control services immediately offered an alternative landing method using terrestrial navigation tools.”

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the FT that its information was “incorrect”.

The Bulgarian Air Traffic Services Authority said there had been a “noticeable increase” in GPS incidents, including jamming, since February 2022 – when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Tens of thousands of incidents of jamming have been reported by airlines operating around the Baltic coast in the last few years. The three Baltic nations – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – are bookended by Russian territory.

In March 2024, an RAF plane carrying the UK’s then-Defence Secretary Grant Schapps reported a spoofing incident – in which legitimate signals are replaced with fake ones, indicating a false location.

The plane, which had been flying near the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which sits between Poland and Lithuania, was able to continue its journey safely.

The issue has become so prevalent that the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) convened a special conference in 2024 to discuss spoofing incidents – warning they could “pose significant challenges to aviation safety”.

Moscow regularly denies accusations of interference or attacks on commercial aviation, and no proven link has yet been established between Russia and the rise in GPS jamming.

But European governments and experts regularly blame Russia, claiming such practices fit with an alleged Kremlin strategy to generally sow disorder and undermine European security.

While planes can rely on other forms of navigation than GPS, jamming it mid-flight can increase the risk of collisions – either with other planes or by causing the pilot to unintentionally fly into the ground, water or other obstacle.

Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme, told the BBC such interference had indeed become a “constant feature” of flying near Russia, disrupting time and positioning services that had “previously been taken for granted”.

“They have gone from isolated incidents to being normalised,” he said, adding that “no one has been willing or able” to convince Moscow to stop an expanding “campaign of interference”.

Von der Leyen was visiting Bulgaria as part of a tour of eastern EU states to discuss defence readiness.

A Commission spokesperson said she had “seen first hand the every day threats from Russia and its proxies” during the tour.

For the past few years, governments across the world have paid close attention to conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. There, it is said, we see the first glimpses of what warfare of the future will look like, not just in terms of weaponry, but also in terms of new technologies and tactics.

Most recently, the United States-Israeli attacks on Iran demonstrated not just new strategies of drone deployment and infiltration but also new vulnerabilities. During the 12-day conflict, Iran and vessels in the waters of the Gulf experienced repeated disruptions of GPS signal.

This clearly worried the Iranian authorities who, after the end of the war, began to look for alternatives.

“At times, disruptions are created on this [GPS] system by internal systems, and this very issue has pushed us toward alternative options like BeiDou,” Ehsan Chitsaz, deputy communications minister, told Iranian media in mid-July. He added that the government was developing a plan to switch transportation, agriculture and the internet from GPS to BeiDou.

Iran’s decision to explore adopting China’s navigation satellite system may appear at first glance to be merely a tactical manoeuvre. Yet, its implications are far more profound. This move is yet another indication of a major global realignment.

For decades, the West, and the US in particular, have dominated the world’s technological infrastructure from computer operating systems and the internet to telecommunications and satellite networks.

This has left much of the world dependent on an infrastructure it cannot match or challenge. This dependency can easily become vulnerability. Since 2013, whistleblowers and media investigations have revealed how various Western technologies and schemes have enabled illicit surveillance and data gathering on a global scale – something that has worried governments around the world.

Iran’s possible shift to BeiDou sends a clear message to other nations grappling with the delicate balance between technological convenience and strategic self-defence: The era of blind, naive dependence on US-controlled infrastructure is rapidly coming to an end. Nations can no longer afford to have their military capabilities and vital digital sovereignty tied to the satellite grid of a superpower they cannot trust.

This sentiment is one of the driving forces behind the creation of national or regional satellite navigation systems, from Europe’s Galileo to Russia’s GLONASS, each vying for a share of the global positioning market and offering a perceived guarantee of sovereign control.

GPS was not the only vulnerability Iran encountered during the US-Israeli attacks. The Israeli army was able to assassinate a number of nuclear scientists and senior commanders in the Iranian security and military forces. The fact that Israel was able to obtain their exact locations raised fears that it was able to infiltrate telecommunications and trace people via their phones.

On June 17 as the conflict was still raging, the Iranian authorities urged the Iranian people to stop using the messaging app WhatsApp and delete it from their phones, saying it was gathering user information to send to Israel. Whether this appeal was linked to the assassinations of the senior officials is unclear, but Iranian mistrust of the app run by US-based corporation Meta is not without merit.

Cybersecurity experts have long been sceptical about the security of the app. Recently, media reports have revealed that the artificial intelligence software Israel uses to target Palestinians in Gaza is reportedly fed data from social media. Furthermore, shortly after the end of the attacks on Iran, the US House of Representatives moved to ban WhatsApp from official devices.

For Iran and other countries around the world, the implications are clear: Western platforms can no longer be trusted as mere conduits for communication; they are now seen as tools in a broader digital intelligence war.

Tehran has already been developing its own intranet system, the National Information Network, which gives more control over internet use to state authorities. Moving forward, Iran will likely expand this process and possibly try to emulate China’s Great Firewall.

By seeking to break with Western-dominated infrastructure, Tehran is definitively aligning itself with a growing sphere of influence that fundamentally challenges Western dominance. This partnership transcends simple transactional exchanges as China offers Iran tools essential for genuine digital and strategic independence.

The broader context for this is China’s colossal Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While often framed as an infrastructure and trade project, BRI has always been about much more than roads and ports. It is an ambitious blueprint for building an alternative global order. Iran – strategically positioned and a key energy supplier – is becoming an increasingly important partner in this expansive vision.

What we are witnessing is the emergence of a new powerful tech bloc – one that inextricably unites digital infrastructure with a shared sense of political defiance. Countries weary of the West’s double standards, unilateral sanctions and overwhelming digital hegemony will increasingly find both comfort and significant leverage in Beijing’s expanding clout.

This accelerating shift heralds the dawn of a new “tech cold war”, a low-temperature confrontation in which nations will increasingly choose their critical infrastructure, from navigation and communications to data flows and financial payment systems, not primarily based on technological superiority or comprehensive global coverage but increasingly on political allegiance and perceived security.

As more and more countries follow suit, the Western technological advantage will begin to shrink in real time, resulting in redesigned international power dynamics.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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