Europe’s PNT at Risk: Why Russian GNSS Jamming Is a Strategic Threat to Critical Infrastructure

Bridge Connect
Jul 25
5 min read

Introduction: A Shadow War You Can’t See

In an increasingly digitised and interconnected world, the satellite signals that quietly power everything from aircraft navigation to time-stamped financial transactions are under siege. European countries—especially those near Russia—are experiencing a silent assault in the form of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) jamming and spoofing. These tactics are not just nuisances; they are part of a deliberate hybrid warfare strategy that undermines civil aviation, shipping, telecoms, and national security.

While missiles and tanks dominate headlines, Russia is waging a more subtle but equally potent campaign through electronic warfare. According to public tracking platforms like GPSJam.org, incidents of interference have increased dramatically in 2024 and 2025, particularly around the Baltic Sea and Black Sea regions. These aren’t isolated anomalies—they are recurring, escalating, and traceable to ground-based emitters in Kaliningrad, Crimea, and the Russian mainland.

This blog unpacks why Europe is vulnerable, how GNSS jamming works, and what the implications are for governments, critical infrastructure operators, and the public.

Why GNSS Matters

GNSS—including GPS (USA), Galileo (EU), GLONASS (Russia), and BeiDou (China)—forms the invisible infrastructure that underpins modern society. The majority of civilian and military applications rely on Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) data derived from these systems.

In Europe, GNSS is essential for:

Aviation navigation and landing procedures
Maritime route planning and collision avoidance
Emergency services and dispatch coordination
Power grid synchronization
Telecoms and 5G time-stamping
Banking transactions and trading systems
Logistics and supply chain operations

Despite this dependence, GNSS signals are inherently weak—transmitted from satellites 20,000 km away, arriving at Earth with less than a billionth of a watt of power. This fragility makes them easy to jam using low-cost, portable equipment. Worse, most civilian GNSS signals are unencrypted, making them susceptible to spoofing (fake signals designed to mislead receivers).

Europe’s Geographic Exposure to Russian Jamming

The European continent is uniquely exposed due to its proximity to multiple Russian territories and geopolitical flashpoints. Several zones have seen repeated GNSS denial activity:

1. Baltic Sea Region (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland)

Kaliningrad—Russia’s heavily militarised exclave between Poland and Lithuania—is home to advanced electronic warfare systems such as the R-330Zh “Zhitel” and Krasukha-4. These systems can jam GNSS, military radar, and satellite communications across hundreds of kilometres.

In June 2025, Lithuania recorded over 1,000 GNSS interference events, up from just 46 in June 2024, according to the Lithuanian Transport Ministry [1].
Aircraft flying in and out of Vilnius, Riga, and Helsinki regularly report degraded GPS performance and must switch to backup inertial navigation or reroute entirely.
The Polish Gdańsk Bay region also experiences routine jamming, attributed to emissions from Kaliningrad and Belarus [2].

2. Black Sea Region (Romania, Bulgaria, Eastern Mediterranean)

Interference in and around Crimea and Russian-occupied territories affects GNSS reliability for shipping lanes, drones, and even NATO surveillance aircraft operating near the exclusion zones.

3. Arctic Circle and High North

Norway and Finland have reported repeated GNSS degradation during military exercises such as Cold Response and Trident Juncture, impacting both civilian aviation and allied troop movements.

These zones are becoming de facto Electronic Buffer Zones—areas of intentional GNSS denial designed to deter NATO surveillance and test resilience in European systems.

The Mechanics of Jamming and Spoofing

GNSS disruption typically comes in two forms:

Jamming

Overwhelms GNSS receivers with stronger radio signals on the same frequency.
Causes complete signal loss, forcing aircraft and ships to revert to non-GNSS systems.
Can be localized (e.g., inside an airport zone) or regional (across 300–500 km).

Spoofing

Sends counterfeit GNSS signals to mislead a receiver into reporting a false position or time.
More sophisticated and difficult to detect than jamming.
Used in several incidents affecting ships in the eastern Mediterranean and civilian aircraft near conflict zones.

According to a 2023 report by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), over 4,500 GNSS outages were recorded across EU airspace in a 12-month period, with a significant concentration near the borders with Russia and Belarus [3].

GNSS Denial as a Tool of Hybrid Warfare

Jamming is not an isolated technical issue—it’s a strategic weapon. Russia has used GNSS disruption in concert with:

Disinformation campaigns
Cyberattacks (e.g. on energy or rail networks)
Physical sabotage (e.g. cutting undersea cables or targeting infrastructure)
Gray-zone incursions (e.g. drone swarms, border provocations)

This suite of non-kinetic tools is part of Russia’s Gerasimov Doctrine—a military strategy combining conventional, asymmetric, and psychological tactics to destabilise adversaries without crossing the threshold of open war.

GNSS denial, in this framework, is ideal: deniable, technically plausible, and hard to attribute definitively.

In April 2025, 17 EU member states led by Latvia submitted a formal letter to the European Council demanding coordinated action against GNSS interference, including possible sanctions and the revocation of radio-spectrum rightsheld by Russia and Belarus under the ITU [4].

Impact on Civil Aviation and Maritime Safety

The aviation sector is particularly vulnerable:

March 2024: A Finnair A320 flying over the Baltic experienced a complete GPS blackout. The crew reverted to inertial backup and landed safely, but ATC confirmed the incident was one of over 300 similar events that month.
May 2025: Lufthansa and Ryanair diverted flights scheduled to land in Estonia due to prolonged GPS signal degradation. EASA issued operational alerts to all commercial airlines flying over the Baltics.

Pilots, who traditionally rely on satellite-based navigation for GNSS RNP approaches (Required Navigation Performance), are increasingly trained to fall back to VOR/DME and other terrestrial aids. But this raises broader questions: How many modern crews have the time and experience to fly "raw data"? Are ground aids maintained to usable levels?

The maritime sector faces similar risks:

Ships traversing the English Channel, Skagerrak, and Black Sea have reported positional anomalies due to spoofing, sometimes appearing several kilometres off course.
AIS (Automatic Identification System) messages have occasionally reflected incorrect GPS-derived positions—raising security concerns in busy ports like Rotterdam and Constanta.

Telecoms, Energy, and Critical Infrastructure

Telecoms and energy networks rely on ultra-precise time signals derived from GNSS:

5G base stations need sub-microsecond synchronization for handovers and signal integrity.
Power grids require synchronized phase measurements for balancing load and avoiding blackouts.

A GNSS disruption lasting even a few seconds could:

Cause handover failures in mobile networks, affecting emergency calls.
Lead to data corruption in SCADA systems and time-series databases.
Induce voltage instability in regional power grids if synchrophasors go out of alignment.

Several operators in Eastern Europe have now accelerated their deployment of resilient PNT systems using atomic clocks, fiber-distributed timing, or Low Earth Orbit (LEO) backup constellations. Yet the costs are high, and implementation is uneven.

Regulatory and Institutional Blind Spots

Despite mounting incidents, GNSS vulnerability remains under-addressed in most EU national security strategies.

The UK's 2023 Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) Strategy was one of the first to explicitly acknowledge the need for terrestrial backup systems like eLORAN. But even here, rollout is limited and hampered by funding constraints and cross-agency responsibilities.

In contrast, the U.S. has issued Presidential Executive Orders mandating that federal agencies assess GNSS dependency and develop APNT (Assured PNT) systems. Europe lacks an equivalent framework.

Only recently has the EU begun to treat GNSS denial as more than an aviation or maritime issue. But with geopolitics sharpening, this must evolve into whole-of-society resilience planning.

Conclusion: The Beginning of the End for Unprotected GNSS?

Russia’s GNSS jamming campaign is a wake-up call. For decades, GNSS systems operated in a permissive space—assumed to be immune to interference because of their complexity and global reach. That assumption no longer holds.

As Europe moves into a new era of strategic confrontation with Russia—and potentially other actors—GNSS disruption will become a default part of the threat environment. The next blog in this series will explore how the Baltic states and Nordic nations are responding, with lessons for the rest of the continent.

Governments, infrastructure operators, telecoms providers, and the aviation sector must now act on a simple premise:

PNT resilience is no longer optional—it is a national imperative.