Lithuania's Communications Regulatory Authority (RRT) said in May 2026 that it has identified 36 GPS spoofing antennas near the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, up from three in early 2025, a twelvefold increase in fifteen months, Reuters reported. The agency now estimates the antennas' combined signal radius at roughly 450 kilometers, a footprint that reaches Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, most of Poland, parts of Finland and Sweden, Belarus and the Baltic Sea itself.
A Twelvefold Expansion, Mapped by Aircraft
RRT deputy head Darius Kuliesius said the range estimate comes from analyzing disturbances in ADS-B transponder signals broadcast by aircraft flying over the region, rather than from direct measurement of the antennas themselves. Spikes in spoofing intensity, he said, line up with Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian territory, which points toward the systems primarily shielding Russian assets rather than targeting NATO states on purpose.
The disruption has mundane knock-on effects. Kuliesius told The Insider that real-time bus tracking in the Lithuanian port city of Klaipeda stops working during the worst spikes, because the municipal transit app relies on GPS positioning to place buses on its map.
Denmark, Finland and Poland Log the Same Pattern
A monitoring station on the Danish island of Bornholm recorded 30 jamming and spoofing incidents in 2026, up from 16 across all of 2025 and 11 in 2024, Danish broadcaster DR reported in August.
Finland's Border Guard issued a similar warning in May, Kyiv Post reported, saying satellite positioning interference once confined to the Gulf of Finland had spread into the Archipelago Sea and the Aland Sea. A deputy commander with the Coast Guard of Western Finland attributed the signals to Russia, saying the jamming likely protects military assets and shipping lanes near St. Petersburg from Ukrainian drone strikes.
Latvia's telecoms regulator logged more than 700 GPS interference incidents in 2024, double the 2023 total, according to a January 2025 analysis by Poland's Centre for Eastern Studies.
Poland's National Institute of Telecommunications runs its own monitoring station in Pomerania, and its readings show the disruption accelerating through the summer. Full GPS outages hit on 63 percent of days in the first nineteen days of August 2026, Euronews reported, after partial disturbances on a single frequency band had already affected close to 30 percent of days in prior weeks. The effects reach beyond phone navigation apps into drones and shipping, and Poland's Space Agency is now building a dedicated sensor network to track the interference going forward.
Spoofing Is a Different Threat Than Jamming
Jamming floods a GNSS receiver with noise, denying it a position fix altogether, a failure mode pilots and ship navigators can recognize and work around with inertial or terrestrial backups. Spoofing instead feeds the receiver a counterfeit satellite signal reporting a false position or time, an attack on the integrity of the data rather than its availability, and one that is harder to detect in real time.
Two incidents pushed that distinction into public view. In August 2025, the chartered aircraft carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen lost GPS guidance while approaching Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Bulgarian authorities said the crew switched to terrestrial navigation tools to land safely, and the European Commission pointed to suspected Russian interference, a claim the Kremlin denied, NBC News reported.
In December 2024, the Bangladeshi flagged bulk carrier Meghna Princess ran aground near the Russian port of Ust Luga. Its tracking data showed a course that briefly placed the vessel on land before the grounding, a pattern Maritime Executive described as consistent with spoofing rather than an ordinary loss of signal.
Why This Counts as Satellite Security, Not Just Electronic Warfare
Civilian GPS and Galileo signals were built without cryptographic authentication. The signal structure is public, so any transmitter that mimics it closely enough can feed a receiver false data, without touching a satellite, a ground station or a single line of code. For most of GPS's history, a receiver had no way to tell a genuine satellite broadcast from a well-crafted fake.
The European Union Agency for the Space Programme switched that on for Galileo in July 2025, when its Open Service Navigation Message Authentication system, known as OSNMA, reached initial operational status. The free service lets a compatible receiver cryptographically verify that a navigation message actually came from a Galileo satellite. It does nothing to stop jamming, and most of the maritime and aviation receivers now reporting interference in the Baltic do not yet use it, but it marks the first time a civilian satellite navigation signal has shipped with built-in origin verification.
Maritime Bodies Escalate, Attribution Hardens
The International Telecommunication Union, the International Civil Aviation Organization and the International Maritime Organization issued a joint warning about GNSS interference in March 2025, urging states to halt jamming operations that endanger civil shipping and aviation.
Iceland and thirteen other European states went further on January 26, 2026, writing to the international maritime community that interference with satellite navigation and spoofing of Automatic Identification System tracks, both attributed to the Russian Federation, were degrading the safety of shipping across the Baltic and North Seas.
Separately, researchers in Poland and Germany have traced part of the interference to the Okunevo antenna complex on Kaliningrad's coast, one of several sites now linked to the spoofing campaign.
NATO's Response Stops Short of Jamming Itself
NATO launched its Baltic Sentry patrol mission in January 2025 after a string of undersea cable and pipeline incidents, deploying ships from its standing naval groups alongside patrol aircraft and underwater drones. The mission's mandate covers critical undersea infrastructure, not electronic interference, and a review by Poland's Centre for Eastern Studies published the same month cautioned that Baltic Sentry has little bearing on the jamming problem.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said after the von der Leyen incident that the alliance takes GPS jamming "very seriously" and is working "day and night" to prevent interference with civilian aircraft, according to NBC News.
The Institute for the Study of War assessed in its review of the Finnish reports that most of the interference reaching NATO territory is a side effect of Russian systems built to shield shipping lanes and military sites near St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad from Ukrainian strikes, rather than a campaign aimed deliberately at Baltic states' civil aviation and shipping, the Kyiv Independent reported.
Reported first by Lithuania's Communications Regulatory Authority and Reuters.
