Russian Spoofing Exposes Latvian Defences

Your phone finds a café by catching faint signals from satellites 20,000 kilometres above you. The signal is so weak it arrives almost buried in static. An armed drone relies on the same fragile thread. Over the Baltic, that weakness has moved from nuisance to weapon.

The impostor frequency

GPS jamming is crude. A transmitter floods the radio frequency with noise until the satellite signal is drowned out. A jammed device usually knows it is lost: it shows "no fix", and the operator can react.

Spoofing is more subtle. A ground transmitter imitates real satellite signals but feeds the receiver false coordinates. The drone accepts the lie, calculates the wrong position, and keeps flying as if nothing has happened.

Jamming shouts over the conversation. Spoofing knows the password.

Russia has jammed Baltic GPS for years. The move towards spoofing is more dangerous because it creates false confidence rather than obvious failure. 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 flights to Estonia's Tartu airport after GPS-dependent landing procedures became unreliable. Pilots have reported cockpit terrain warnings screaming "PULL UP!" at cruising altitude because spoofed coordinates have placed the aircraft underground.

The exercise Sweden had to restart three times

Sweden's Aurora 26 military exercise on Gotland this spring gave NATO a sharp lesson in what GPS-contested warfare now looks like. Ukrainian drone teams, invited because they have spent years fighting in exactly these conditions, overwhelmed Swedish forces so decisively the military restarted the simulation three times.

Their advantage was not better kit. It was habit. Ukrainian operators have learned to fly under Russian electronic warfare, using visual terrain matching and ground-station triangulation when satellite signals cannot be trusted. Swedish forces, trained for more conventional air threats, had no equivalent playbook.

The exercise exposed a deeper mismatch. NATO air defence was built to track fast, high-flying aircraft with large radar signatures. Small drones move low and slowly, and on radar they can look closer to a bird than a fighter jet.

Latvia: when the gap detonates

That gap 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, gave 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 money tells its own story. Latvia has approved €3.49 billion in EU SAFE defence loans for military hardware. Its emergency communications network, the system that would warn civilians of an incoming drone, faces a shortfall of €600,000.

The same imbalance runs across the eastern flank. Estonia has allocated €3.7 million for cell broadcast alerts. Finland has put €44 million into drone defence. Military procurement is moving in billions. Civilian protection is still being funded as an afterthought.

What Europe hasn't built

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

Ukraine has already been forced into the next phase: GPS-free navigation, with drones that recognise terrain visually or triangulate from ground stations. In that world, spoofing loses much of its power.

Europe's civilian infrastructure has not begun that transition. The defence required is practical rather than rhetorical: sensors dense enough to detect small, slow objects, and command structures quick enough to act before they land.