SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) — A plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was hit by GPS jamming over Bulgaria in a suspected Russian operation, a spokesperson said Monday.
The plane landed safely at Plovdiv airport and von der Leyen will continue her planned tour of European Union’s nations in the east, said commission spokesperson Arianna Podestà.
“We can indeed confirm that there was GPS jamming,” said 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 plane is the latest in a series involving suspected Russian electronic interference with GPS satellite navigation. For months, countries bordering Russia — including Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — have warned of increased electronic activity interfering with flights, ships and drones. Russian authorities did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
Von der Leyen, a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow’s war in Ukraine, is on a four-day tour of much of the EU's eastern 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 said.
She said 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 said.
Bulgaria issued a statement saying that during the flight from Warsaw, Poland to Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second-largest city, of a private jet chartered by the European Commission, “the satellite signal used for the aircraft’s GPS navigation was disrupted." "As the aircraft approached Plovdiv Airport, the GPS signal was lost,” the statement said. It said that Bulgaria's Civil Aviation Authority instructed the pilots to use backup navigation aids to land the plane.
The Associated Press has plotted almost 80 incidents on a map tracking a campaign of disruption across Europe blamed on Russia, which Western officials have described as staggeringly “reckless.” Since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Western officials have accused Russia and its proxies of staging dozens of attacks and other incidents, ranging from vandalism to arson and attempted assassination.
The interference from Russia includes jamming and spoofing. Jamming means a strong radio signal overwhelms communications, whereas spoofing misleads a receiver into thinking it is in a different location or in a past or future time period.
In August, Latvia’s Electronic Communications Office said it had identified at least three hot spots for jamming along borders with Russia. In April 2024, a Finnish airline temporarily suspended flights to the Estonian city of Tartu following jamming, while in March that year, a plane carrying the British defense secretary had its satellite signal jammed as it flew near Russian territory.
The office said that although Russia maintains the jamming is defensive, the frequency has increased as interference extends further from Russia’s borders.
Pilots and air traffic controllers from Sweden to Bulgaria are “are reinventing the old-school methods of navigating because they cannot rely on GPS anymore,” said Eric Shouten, an intelligence analyst and CEO of Dyami Security Intelligence based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He said it is unlikely that Russia specifically targeted von der Leyen.
“Russia knew she was coming,” Shouten said. “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.
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