Nato may be forced into a retaliatory attack on Russian military bases in Kaliningrad in the near future, as the Kremlin continues to recklessly bait the alliance. Moscow is jamming GPS across Europe’s eastern flank, targeting not just military systems but civilian aviation and maritime traffic as well.
Experts are increasingly concerned that a major accident involving commercial aviation is only a matter of time. Russian GPS interference is a daily occurrence across the Baltics, northern Poland, southern Finland and also in parts of Germany. The jamming affects civilian aircraft, which are regularly forced to deploy backup systems.
Planes have even had to divert or abort their landings, leading some airlines to cancel flights altogether. Finnair has been unable to fly to Estonia for over a month due to safety concerns caused by the GPS interference.
The main sources of the disruptions are Russian electronic warfare (EW) systems based in Kaliningrad – a Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea. These devices include the Okunevo antenna and jamming systems such as Borisoglebsk-2 and Murmansk-BN, also used in Ukraine.
The GPS interference can lead to pilots losing satellite navigation mid-flight with little warning, thereby increasing the risk of a crash landing or mid-air collision.
Nato has rapidly developed a backup navigation system called R-mode to guide aircraft and ships with ground-based radio beacons without GPS satellite input.
However, German and Baltic officials have warned that these emergency systems may not be reliable enough to prevent a catastrophic crash. Ships have also been affected by the jamming, losing positional accuracy in the Baltic Sea near Kaliningrad.
Nato has already warned Russia that should a commercial plane or passenger ferry crash due to GPS jamming, then it would consider the event not as an accident but as a deliberate escalation. If hundreds of civilians were to die in any such crash, then the political pressure on Nato to retaliate would be enormous – with all the consequent risks of escalation that would entail.
Some military analysts fear that a Nato country might in the worst case scenario be goaded into launching a military strike on the jamming systems in Kaliningrad. They argue that this is precisely what Russia wants, as this would give the Kremlin a pretext to attack.
Moscow would claim it was under attack, flipping the narrative and eliminating the defensive nature of Article 5 from the playing field.
