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Russian satellites linked to mysterious GPS disruptions across several countries
Since 2019, GPS signals across Europe, Greenland and Canada have experienced a huge spike in sudden, widespread signal blackouts. These have resulted in disruptions and degraded performance in navigation systems that airplanes and ships rely on to travel safely.
Some causes are known, such as military jamming on the ground, but others have been a total mystery. A new paper published on the arXiv preprint server points an accusatory finger at Russia, claiming that a constellation of Russian satellites is likely responsible for many of these interference events, which have been blasting out waves of radio static from space.
The study focuses on how these events affected the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) that GPS relies on. The researchers studied 75 separate days on which at least one major interference event occurred.
Characteristic interference...The team's analysis revealed that these space-based signals have very specific traits. They are short and sharp, typically lasting fewer than 10 seconds, and act like a wall of static, causing a sudden, dramatic drop in connection quality for receivers on the ground.
The signals primarily target the GPS L1 frequency, which is the frequency civilian airplanes and cargo ships use.
"High-powered interference with continental reach affecting the GPS L1 band—the primary band used for global aviation, shipping and precise timing—is of serious concern," the researchers commented in their paper.
Additionally, the system appears to follow a business schedule, as disruptions almost always occur during regular working hours on weekdays.
There is still the open question of why the Russian satellites appear to be periodically engaging in short bursts of targeted GPS interference over Europe—especially because the jamming signal is slightly offset from the usual GPS frequency band.
In the Veritasium video, Humphreys speculated that the Russians may have been testing the satellites’ GPS interference capabilities only briefly on a neighboring frequency adjacent to the typical GPS band. “And then in the eventual future when there is a hot conflict, they go ahead and tune their transmitter down to the GPS band, but it’s much more damaging now that it lies right on that band,” he said.
Incidentally, the raw data also revealed a second interference burst from the Russian satellites in a lower-frequency band used by China’s BeiDou navigation system.
“I can no longer say this is accidental with confidence,” Humphreys told Veritasium. He also described the Russian satellites’ quiet demonstration as a “massive escalation in the electronic warfare background conflict that is going on right now.”
But Richard Bowden, division head of assured and resilient PNT at the multinational technology company GMV in Spain, shared a different theory with Veritasium about how the interference bursts may actually represent short communication messages being sent from Russian satellites. Bowden’s team independently identified at least two of the Russian satellites as the source of the GPS interference pattern.
“These signals are, without a doubt, intentional and placed on or around GNSS signals, and have the potential to disrupt legitimate use of GNSS services,” Bowden wrote in a LinkedIn comment. “But from our side at least, we can’t be sure they are intentionally malicious or intended as an EW [electronic warfare] weapon.”
So how did they find the culprit? The team studied data from global GPS monitoring collected over seven years, from 2019 to 2026. This told them that the interference was consistent with a single space-based source affecting massive areas simultaneously.
They also developed an algorithm that can detect the source of a signal drop by combining raw radio measurements with satellite-tracking catalogs.
Is Russia to blame? The algorithm filtered out satellites that could not have been in a position to affect the areas involved, narrowing the candidates to a small pool. It then cross-referenced the timing differences of the radio signals arriving at different ground stations to estimate the transmitter's location and compared this with known satellite orbits.
This led them directly to a Russian constellation of missile-warning satellites, which spend much of their time high above the Northern Hemisphere.
"It is highly probable that the EKS constellation is collectively responsible for the wide-area transient GNSS interference events noted since 2019," said the researchers.
© 2026 Science XN
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