Russian Spoofing Blinds Latvian Defences

A phone in Malta finds the nearest café by catching weak signals from satellites 20,000 kilometres above the earth. An armed drone can fly by the same system. Over the Baltic, that shared dependency has become a military weakness.

The impostor frequency

GPS jamming is the blunt version of the problem: a transmitter floods the radio frequency with noise until the satellite signal is lost. The device knows it is blind. It shows "no fix", and the operator can react.

GPS spoofing is more dangerous because it imitates the real thing. A ground transmitter sends signals that look like genuine satellite data but carry false coordinates. The drone's receiver accepts them, calculates the wrong position, and carries on as if nothing has happened.

Russia has jammed Baltic GPS for years. The move towards spoofing changes the risk. 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 shouting "PULL UP!" at cruising altitude because spoofed coordinates placed the aircraft underground.

The exercise Sweden had to restart three times

Sweden's Aurora 26 military exercise on Gotland this spring gave NATO one of its clearest tests of warfare under GPS attack. Ukrainian drone teams, invited after years of frontline experience in these conditions, overwhelmed Swedish forces so decisively that the military restarted the simulation three times.

Their advantage was not better equipment. It was habit. Ukrainian operators have spent years flying under Russian electronic warfare, using visual terrain matching and ground-station triangulation when satellite signals cannot be trusted. Swedish forces, trained mainly against conventional air threats, had no comparable playbook.

The exercise exposed a design problem. NATO air defence was built to track fast, high-flying aircraft with large radar signatures. Small drones fly low and slow. On radar, they can look closer to a bird than to a fighter jet.

Latvia: when the gap detonates

That weakness became real on 24 May 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 sharpest admission yet from a NATO commander: the drone "was not detected at all." Latvia's caretaker government, left without a security policy mandate since Prime Minister Siliņa's resignation on 7 May, has no clear mechanism to close the gap.

The money shows the imbalance. 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, is short by €600,000. The same pattern appears across the eastern flank: Estonia has allocated €3.7 million for cell broadcast alerts, Finland €44 million for drone defence. Military procurement is being funded in billions. Civilian protection is still treated as a smaller administrative cost.

What Europe has not built

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

Ukraine, pushed by necessity, is already using GPS-free navigation: drones that recognise terrain visually or triangulate from ground stations, making spoofing far less useful. Europe's civilian infrastructure has not made that shift. Defence now requires two things still missing in many places: a sensor network dense enough to detect small, slow objects, and command structures fast enough to act before they land.