Russian satellite tied to GPS jamming

Somewhere above Europe, about 36,000 kilometres up, a Russian military satellite sends a burst of radio energy towards Earth. It is gone in less than five seconds. A phone map judders and settles. A pilot near Warsaw gets a brief cockpit warning before the signal returns. A cargo ship in the Baltic hesitates on autopilot, then carries on.

These pulses have been passing over Europe since October 2019. Until last week, no one had pinned down their source. Researchers have now traced them to specific Russian military satellites, revealing a form of orbital GPS jamming that European security bodies had never publicly acknowledged.

Triangulating lightning from space

The study, "Chasing Lightning," examined seven years of data from 165 GPS reference stations run by the International GNSS Service and archived by NASA. The team, led by Todd Humphreys at the University of Texas, found 75 distinct days when GPS signals dropped suddenly and at the same time across stations from Svalbard to Spain to Greenland. Each event lasted three to five seconds.

That simultaneity matters. No ground transmitter, not even Russia’s 36-antenna installation in Kaliningrad, can cover that much territory in one burst. The source had to be in space.

The break came in February 2026, when two highly sensitive tracking stations in Amsterdam and Trondheim caught the same pulse. It reached Norway 139 microseconds earlier. The principle is like hearing thunder from two places and working backwards to where the lightning struck. That timing gap defines a surface in space where the source must have been. When researchers checked it against every tracked satellite in orbit, only one fitted: Cosmos 2546, a Russian military early-warning satellite (arXiv:2606.03673, Boston Globe). The match was accurate to within 200 metres. Spain’s GMV, the main ESA contractor for Galileo, ran its own investigation and reached the same conclusion.

A signal with a schedule

The interference peaks at 1,577.5 MHz, close to the civilian GPS frequency, with enough power to suppress GPS, Galileo and China’s BeiDou at the same time while leaving Russia’s own GLONASS unaffected. The events cluster on weekdays during European business hours. Random malfunction does not usually keep office hours.

The study is a preprint and has not yet been peer-reviewed. The researchers also say they cannot prove intent. But the first recorded event came in October 2019, one month after Russia’s first operational EKS satellite reached orbit. EKS is Russia’s missile-detection early-warning network, and the timing is not easy to dismiss.

Two layers of a single problem

European attention has mostly been on continuous ground-based interference from Kaliningrad, which can redirect drones and disrupt shipping for hours. The orbital pulses are different, and harder to counter. On June 5, a Ukrainian maritime drone lost contact with its operators and self-destructed inside Romania’s Constanța port after prolonged GPS interference. Open-source monitoring platforms measured interference at 200% of baseline over the previous hours. That sort of sustained disruption comes from ground transmitters.

The five-second satellite pulses do not crash drones. They do something quieter: they weaken confidence in navigation across an entire continent at the same moment. EUROCONTROL data from August 2024 showed about 1,500 flights a day experiencing GPS disruption. Finland alone reported 1,200 incidents in a single year, up from 239 the year before. Aircraft keep flying because pilots can fall back on inertial navigation. But repeated, hard-to-prove degradation eats away at the systems that hold timing, logistics and modern transport together.

Nine years without a shield

Europe’s main countermeasure, Galileo’s OSNMA authentication protocol, went live in July 2025. It confirms that a navigation signal is coming from a real satellite rather than a fake ground-based source. That helps against spoofing, where a false signal tricks a receiver. It does not help against jamming, where the real signal is simply drowned out.

The real fix is Céleste, a planned low-orbit constellation designed to transmit stronger signals that are harder to overwhelm. ESA launched two demonstrators in March 2026, and they sent their first navigation signal on April 8. The operational constellation is expected around 2035.

That leaves Europe with a nine-year gap and no effective defence against orbital jamming. The UK and France are deploying eLoran, a high-power terrestrial backup resistant to space-based interference, but the rest of the continent has no firm timetable. Russia, asked about the allegations, has demanded Europe "present at least some evidence." The researchers have now done that. The question for Europe is whether it treats this as an interesting paper or as an infrastructure problem that has already arrived.