SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) — A airplane carrying European Fee President Ursula von der Leyen was hit by GPS jamming over Bulgaria in a suspected Russian operation, a spokesperson mentioned Monday.
The airplane landed safely at Plovdiv airport and von der Leyen will proceed her deliberate tour of European Union’s nations within the east, mentioned fee spokesperson Arianna Podestà.
“We can indeed confirm that there was GPS jamming,” mentioned Podestà. “We have received information from the Bulgarian authority that they suspect that this was due to blatant interference by Russia.”
The incident with von der Leyen’s airplane is the most recent in a collection involving suspected Russian digital interference with GPS satellite tv for pc navigation. For months, international locations bordering Russia — together with Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — have warned of elevated digital exercise interfering with flights, ships and drones. Russian authorities didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
AP Photograph/Mindaugas Kulbis
Von der Leyen, a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow’s warfare in Ukraine, is on a four-day tour of a lot of the EU’s japanese flank, visiting Lithuania, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria.
“This incident actually underlines the urgency of the mission that the president is carrying out in the front-line member states,” Podestà mentioned.
She mentioned that von der Leyen has seen “firsthand the everyday challenges of threats coming from Russia and its proxies.”
“And, of course, the EU will continue to invest into defense spending and in Europe’s readiness even more after this incident,” she mentioned.
Bulgaria issued an announcement saying that throughout the flight from Warsaw, Poland to Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second-largest metropolis, of a non-public jet chartered by the European Fee, “the satellite signal used for the aircraft’s GPS navigation was disrupted.” “As the aircraft approached Plovdiv Airport, the GPS signal was lost,” the assertion mentioned. It mentioned that Bulgaria’s Civil Aviation Authority instructed the pilots to make use of backup navigation aids to land the airplane.
The Related Press has plotted virtually 80 incidents on a map monitoring a marketing campaign of disruption throughout Europe blamed on Russia, which Western officers have described as staggeringly “reckless.” Since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Western officers have accused Russia and its proxies of staging dozens of assaults and different incidents, starting from vandalism to arson and tried assassination.
The interference from Russia consists of jamming and spoofing. Jamming means a powerful radio sign overwhelms communications, whereas spoofing misleads a receiver into considering it’s in a special location or in a previous or future time interval.
In August, Latvia’s Digital Communications Workplace mentioned it had recognized not less than three scorching spots for jamming alongside borders with Russia. In April 2024, a Finnish airline briefly suspended flights to the Estonian metropolis of Tartu following jamming, whereas in March that 12 months, a airplane carrying the British protection secretary had its satellite tv for pc sign jammed because it flew close to Russian territory.
The workplace mentioned that though Russia maintains the jamming is defensive, the frequency has elevated as interference extends farther from Russia’s borders.
Pilots and air site visitors controllers from Sweden to Bulgaria are “are reinventing the old-school methods of navigating because they cannot rely on GPS anymore,” mentioned Eric Shouten, an intelligence analyst and CEO of Dyami Safety Intelligence primarily based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He mentioned it’s unlikely that Russia particularly focused von der Leyen.
“Russia knew she was coming,” Shouten mentioned. “They can just turn up the knob a little bit to be an irritating neighbor.”
— McNeil reported from Brussels. Writers Emma Burrows in London and Zeke Miller in Washington, D.C. contributed to this report.
