NATO is working to thwart Russian jamming of civilian flights, said the alliance’s chief on Tuesday, two days after a jet carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen lost its ability to use GPS navigation midair in Bulgarian airspace.
The plane landed safely on Sunday, but Bulgarian authorities said they suspected Russia was behind the interference.
“It is taken very seriously,” said NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte during a news conference in Luxembourg with the duchy’s prime minister and defense minister. “I can assure you that we are working day and night to counter this, to prevent it, and to make sure that they will not do it again.” He did not elaborate.
Neither Russia nor von der Leyen has commented publicly on the incident. The EU and NATO are separate entities with different sets of member countries, but Europe’s security is a vital issue for both.
Rutte said the jamming was part of a complex campaign by Russia of “hybrid threats” like cutting of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea, a plot to assassinate a German industrialist, and a cyberattack on the National Heath Service in the United Kingdom.
“I have always hated the words hybrid because it sounds so cuddly, but hybrid is exactly this jamming of commercial airplanes, with potentially disastrous effects,” he said.
The Associated Press has plotted almost 80 incidents on a map tracking a campaign of disruption across Europe blamed on Russia, which the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service has described as “staggeringly reckless.” Since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Western officials have accused Russia and its proxies of staging dozens of attacks and other incidents, ranging from vandalism to arson and attempted assassination.
The interference from Russia includes jamming and spoofing. Jamming means a strong radio signal overwhelms communications, whereas spoofing misleads a receiver into thinking it is in a different location or in a past or future time period.
“The threat from the Russians is increasing every day. Let’s not be naive about it: this might also involve one day Luxembourg, it might come to the Netherlands,” Rutte said. “With the latest Russian missile technology for example, the difference now between Lithuania on the front line and Luxembourg, The Hague or Madrid is five to 10 minutes. That’s the time it takes this missile to reach these parts of Europe.”
The whole continent was under “direct threat from the Russians,” he warned. “We are all on the eastern flank now, whether you live in London or Tallinn.”
Bulgaria will not investigate the jamming of von der Leyen’s plane because “such things happen every day,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov said Tuesday.
He said it was one of the side effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine and had occurred across Europe.
Associated Press writer Veselin Toshkov in Sofia, Bulgaria contributed to this report.
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