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 neither ItaMilRadar nor any 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.

Past research has traced much of the Baltic interference to Russia. 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.

Some researchers see the interference as spillover from Russian military jamming meant to protect bases and other sites from Ukrainian drones that rely on satellite guidance. Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Sweden and Germany have called it deliberate hybrid warfare, and eight European countries, including the Baltic states, Finland and Poland, filed a complaint with the United Nations over it in 2025.

The southern part of the band follows the area where Russian drones attacking Ukraine have repeatedly strayed into NATO airspace. In September, a Russian drone flew deep into Romania before crashing in Moldova. Russia fields a wide range of electronic warfare systems, including mobile jammers that have turned up as far away as Africa, where an Infauna electronic warfare vehicle was recently spotted in Mali.