Russian spoofing blinds Latvian air defenses

Your phone finds the nearest café by listening to faint whispers from satellites 20,000 kilometres overhead. Those signals arrive so weak they're buried in static. An armed drone navigates the same way. Over the Baltic, that shared vulnerability just turned kinetic.

The impostor frequency

GPS jamming is brute force: flood a radio frequency with noise until the satellite signal drowns. A jammed device knows it's blind. It shows "no fix," and the operator can respond. GPS spoofing works by mimicry. A ground transmitter broadcasts signals identical to real satellite data but encoding false coordinates. The drone's receiver locks on, calculates a wrong position, and keeps flying with full confidence.

Jamming is shouting over a conversation. Spoofing is an impostor who knows the password.

Russia has been jamming Baltic GPS for years. The shift to spoofing is more dangerous. Interference from Kaliningrad now covers areas exceeding 400 kilometres. In January 2026, over 1,400 civil aircraft reported navigation anomalies in Lithuanian airspace, a 40% increase from 2025. Finnair suspended service to Estonia's Tartu airport after GPS-dependent landing procedures became unreliable. Pilots report cockpit terrain warnings screaming "PULL UP!" at cruising altitude because spoofed coordinates place the aircraft underground.

The exercise Sweden had to restart three times

Sweden's Aurora 26 military exercise on Gotland this spring offered the most vivid test of GPS-contested warfare for a NATO ally. Ukrainian drone teams, invited with years of frontline experience in exactly these conditions, overwhelmed Swedish forces so decisively the military restarted the simulation three times.

The Ukrainians' edge wasn't better hardware. It was adaptation. Years of fighting under Russian electronic warfare taught their operators to fly in GPS-denied environments, using visual terrain matching and ground-station triangulation instead of satellite signals. Swedish forces, trained against conventional air threats, had no equivalent playbook.

The exercise revealed a structural mismatch. NATO's air defense was designed to track fast, high-altitude aircraft with large radar signatures. Small drones fly low and slow, with radar cross-sections closer to a bird's than a fighter jet's.

Latvia: when the gap detonates

That mismatch became real on May 24, 2026. An armed drone carrying explosives detonated at a fuel depot in Rēzekne, Latvia, inside NATO territory. National sensors detected nothing. Local residents reported the blast. Authorities took five hours to respond.

Latvia's top general, Leonīds Pudans, offered the bluntest admission of detection failure yet heard from any NATO commander: the drone "was not detected at all." Latvia's caretaker government, without a security policy mandate since Prime Minister Siliņa's May 7 resignation, has no mechanism to close the gap.

The spending reveals the imbalance. Latvia has approved €3.49 billion in EU SAFE defense loans for military hardware. Its emergency communications network, the system that would actually warn civilians of an incoming drone, faces a shortfall of €600,000. Across the eastern flank the pattern repeats: Estonia has allocated €3.7 million for cell broadcast alerts, Finland €44 million for drone defense. Military procurement runs at billions-scale. Civilian protection remains underfunded by orders of magnitude.

What Europe hasn't built

The GPS signals guiding passenger jets and ambulances are the same ones being manipulated to redirect armed drones. The electronic battlefield over the Baltic has no front line.

Ukraine, forced by necessity, is already fielding GPS-free navigation: drones that recognise terrain visually or triangulate from ground stations, making spoofing irrelevant. Europe's civilian infrastructure hasn't started that transition. Defending against this requires two things that don't yet exist: a sensor network dense enough to detect small, slow objects, and command structures fast enough to act before they land.