Cosmos 2546 linked to GPS jamming

Roughly 36,000 kilometres above Europe, a Russian military satellite fires a burst of radio energy towards Earth. It lasts less than five seconds. A phone map hesitates and corrects itself. A pilot near Warsaw sees a brief cockpit warning before the signal returns. A cargo ship in the Baltic loses a moment of certainty on autopilot.

Europe has been receiving these invisible pulses since October 2019. Until now, their source could not be pinned down. Researchers say they have traced them to specific Russian military satellites, exposing an orbital form of GPS jamming that European security institutions had not 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 suddenly dropped at the same time across stations from Svalbard to Spain to Greenland. Each event lasted three to five seconds.

The timing matters. No ground transmitter, not even Russia's 36-antenna installation in Kaliningrad, can cover that geography at once. The source had to be above the continent.

The proof came in February 2026, when two highly sensitive tracking stations in Amsterdam and Trondheim recorded the same pulse. It reached Norway 139 microseconds earlier. The principle is simple enough: hear thunder from two places, then work backwards to locate the lightning. That tiny timing gap defined the area in space where the signal must have originated. When researchers checked it against every tracked satellite in orbit, only one matched: Cosmos 2546, a Russian military early-warning satellite (arXiv:2606.03673, Boston Globe). The match was precise to 200 metres. Spain's GMV, the main ESA contractor for Galileo, ran a separate 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 simultaneously while leaving Russia's own GLONASS untouched. The events cluster on weekdays during European business hours. A random fault 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The study is a preprint and has not yet been peer-reviewed.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. The sequence is difficult to dismiss as coincidence.

Two layers of a single problem

Europe has focused mainly on continuous ground-based interference from Kaliningrad, which can redirect drones and disrupt shipping for hours. The orbital pulses are a different problem, and harder to block. 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 in the preceding hours. That sort of sustained disruption points to ground transmitters.

The five-second satellite pulses do not crash drones by themselves. They weaken confidence in navigation across a whole continent at the same moment. EUROCONTROL data from August 2024 showed around 1,500 flights a day experiencing GPS disruption. Finland alone reported 1,200 incidents in one year, up from 239 the year before. Aircraft keep flying because pilots can fall back on inertial navigation. The deeper damage is to systems that depend on trusted timing and positioning: aviation, port logistics, digital payments and the transport networks that Malta also depends on every day.

Nine years without a shield

Europe's main countermeasure, Galileo's OSNMA authentication protocol, went live in July 2025. It checks whether a navigation signal comes from a real satellite rather than a fake ground-based source. That helps against spoofing, meaning false signals. It does not help against jamming, where the real signal is simply drowned out.

The relevant 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, which 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 produced it. The decision facing Europe is whether to treat this as an interesting paper or as a warning about infrastructure that was assumed to be dependable.