GPS jamming hits almost all of NATO's eastern flank in one day

Satellite navigation interference hit almost the entire length of NATO's eastern border on Nov. 3, according to a map of aircraft data published by the Italian flight-tracking project ItaMilRadar. The heaviest disruption ran in a nearly continuous band from the southern Baltic Sea through Lithuania, eastern Poland, Romania and Bulgaria to the western Black Sea. "Yesterday’s jamming map is particularly interesting. Virtually the entire eastern flank of NATO is affected by strong, geographically concentrated jamming along the eastern border," ItaMilRadar said in a post on Nov. 4. The map, built with data from AirNav Radar, shows where aircraft reported degraded GPS and other satellite navigation signals during the day. The densest areas sat over the Baltic coast near Russia's Kaliningrad exclave, along Poland's border with Belarus and Ukraine, over Romania and Moldova, and along Bulgaria's Black Sea coast. Lighter interference showed up along air routes across Belarus and western Russia, around Crimea and in the Caucasus. Maps like this one show where aircraft lost navigation accuracy. They do not identify the source of the signals, and no government has said who was behind the Nov. 3 interference. ItaMilRadar data shows widespread satellite navigation interference along much of NATO’s eastern flank, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Nov. 3, 2026. The shape of the band points to a link with the air war over Ukraine. The interference closely follows the border areas that Russian attack drones have crossed during strikes on Ukraine, and part of it may come from counter-drone jamming that NATO countries use to push satellite-guided drones off course before they reach their territory. Along the borders with Belarus and Kaliningrad, the signal blocking could be coming from the European side as well as from Russia. None of the governments involved has confirmed using jamming on that scale. Russian sources have driven much of the Baltic interference in the past. A research team using monitoring stations around Poland's Gdańsk Bay located jamming and spoofing sources at two coastal sites in Kaliningrad near known electronic warfare units, Defense News reported, with a second hotspot around St. Petersburg. In early 2025, Sweden and five neighboring countries told the International Civil Aviation Organization that about 123,000 flights over Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and Sweden were affected by interference in the first four months of that year, GPS World reported, tracing it to Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, Smolensk and Rostov. Drones have repeatedly strayed across NATO's eastern border during Russian strikes on Ukraine. In September, a Russian drone flew deep into Romania before crashing in Moldova. Russia fields a wide range of electronic warfare systems of its own, including mobile jammers that have turned up as far away as Africa, where an Infauna electronic warfare vehicle was recently spotted in Mali.