Design and capabilities
GNSS jamming blocks legitimate satellite-navigation signals by broadcasting noise on the same frequencies, denying an affected receiver any usable position or timing fix. That makes it the blunter counterpart to spoofing, covered separately in this glossary: a jammed receiver typically reports "no signal" rather than a false one, which makes jamming easier to detect but no less disruptive, since ships, aircraft, and drones alike lose their primary positioning reference.
Operational history
Poland's Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz has publicly linked GPS disruptions over the Baltic Sea to Russian activity, and multiple Baltic and Nordic states have separately raised the interference pattern with the International Telecommunication Union. Satellite-monitoring firm Spire Global documented jamming events near Kaliningrad in October 2024 lasting up to seven hours and affecting all four major satellite constellations - GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou - with position errors exceeding 30 metres, sourced to mobile jamming equipment aboard vessels in international waters rather than fixed land installations alone. In January 2026, fourteen Baltic and North Sea coastal states, including Poland, Finland, and the three Baltic states, issued a joint open letter declaring they would no longer tolerate GNSS and AIS interference as a violation of international maritime law, and called for terrestrial backup navigation systems; several Nordic states have since begun such projects.
AirVeto context
Kaliningrad, wedged between Poland and Lithuania, is repeatedly identified as the most persistent GNSS interference zone along the border AirVeto covers, linked by multiple sources to known Russian electronic-warfare installations, including the Tobol system covered elsewhere in this glossary - though Spire's own reporting does not identify every mobile emitter it detected as Tobol specifically, so that attribution should stay open-source-inference language rather than settled fact. Jamming and spoofing frequently occur together in this region and should be read as parts of the same broader interference campaign rather than separate phenomena; this entry focuses on the aviation-safety dimension of that campaign, while the neighbouring GPS spoofing entry covers the maritime AIS cases in more detail.