In most of Europe, Christmas Day delivered a modicum of calm and cheer, but it didn’t last long. On the second day of Christmas, the Baltic Sea region was hit by a mysterious failure in the widely used GPS satellite positioning system.
We may never know for certain who was behind it, though the most likely explanation points to Russian involvement. When three data and energy links on the Baltic seabed were attacked in the fall of 2023, Russian and Chinese vessels were directly above the targeted sites, and it later emerged the Chinese ship had severed a gas pipeline by dragging an anchor across it. Finnish sources blamed Russia for another attack.
Regardless, the Boxing Day jamming demonstrates, once again, that aggression can appear anywhere, anytime, using any tool.
It first became obvious to pilots, aviation enthusiasts, and users of websites like GPSjam.com: on December 26, Southern Sweden, Northeastern Germany, and large parts of Poland suffered large-scale GPS jamming.
On an ordinary day, the GPS jam map of Europe west of Russia is almost exclusively green, which means there’s GPS interference of 0%-2%. At most, there are a few yellow dots, which means an interference level of 2%-10%. But on December 26, a large swathe of land and water between Växjö in the north, Stralsund and Neubrandenburg in the west, Łódź in the south, and Białystok in the east was red, indicating a GPS interference level of more than 10%. It wasn’t the first case of GPS jamming to hit northern Europe (northern Norway and Finland have been affected before), but it was by far the most severe.
As users of Google Maps, Apple Maps, and other location services know, GPS jamming suddenly makes finding one’s way much harder because one can’t be sure that the directions correspond to reality.
But GPS jamming doesn’t just cause annoyance for ordinary citizens: it’s a nuisance for pilots, who rely on GPS for navigation and landing. To be sure, pilots are trained to manually land their planes if GPS jamming is detected: you don’t have to worry that such satellite jamming will cause your pilot to land on a non-existent runway.
“Our aviators are very aware of potential GPS disturbances in different areas,” Finnair’s communications department told YLE, Finnish public broadcasting, on December 26. But GPS jamming is troubling all the same: if the system on which so much economic infrastructure is based is not dependable, what’s the point of having it in the first place?
If GPS jamming were to become a regular occurrence in Europe (or elsewhere), governments and businesses might decide to reduce their use of GPS. Going manual would be safer — but also less efficient.
On the third day of Christmas, the jamming ended as suddenly as it had begun. The speed and extent of the event strongly suggest it was not an accident. And Russia is known to have been behind the GPS jamming in the High North and — before the invasion of Ukraine — also jammed shipping in the Black Sea (it’s also worth noting that commercial GPS jamming is depressingly easy.)
Yes, it’s innocent until proven guilty, and the perpetrator of the Boxing Day attack may never be identified. The GPS system failure might have had another cause.
But, on one level it doesn’t matter. What matters is that someone managed to disrupt GPS across a large chunk of Europe. What would you do if your Google Maps seemed off or you heard on the news that your GPS had been jammed? Most likely you’d be very worried, most likely the risks would be spelled out (wrongly) by social media doomsters, and in all likelihood, some people would reach the wrong conclusions. Remember the reaction of US East Coast residents when a ransomware gang struck Colonial Pipeline in May 2021: upon hearing the news, they panicked and stockpiled gasoline, thus massively worsening the attack’s effects.
Of course, that is exactly the effect perpetrators of attacks on critical national infrastructure hope for. And because most ordinary citizens aren’t trained in crisis preparedness or response, they panic – or act selfishly – when even a relatively modest incident occurs.
That’s why Sweden’s If Crisis or War Comes leaflet, published and sent to every household in the country in May 2018, was such a wise move. Though some international voices accused Sweden of being paranoid, the leaflet was – and is – perfect, common-sense preparation for incidents like GPS jamming and power outages (and yes, war).
A few countries in the Nordic-Baltic region have since published similar instructions, and last month the UK Government acknowledged the power of the citizenry in its Annual Resilience Statement and the need for a new resilience academy. In Latvia, high schoolers receive mandatory resilience training — including the ability to read paper maps.
Liberal democracies will never be able to fully thwart every attack on critical national infrastructure. On the contrary, the continued advance of digital services and infrastructure will make advanced economies even more vulnerable to such attacks, and they may never be able to conclusively establish the identity of the perpetrator. That, of course, means they won’t be able to mete out punishment either.
The Joint Expeditionary Force has just launched a maritime initiative that will see the grouping’s 10 countries conduct naval undersea cable patrols, but the threats against critical national infrastructure exceed any Western government’s ability to detect them.
That makes societal resilience indispensable. Just like pilots know what to do if GPS is jammed, the rest of us should know what to do in case GPS is jammed, and it won’t be nearly as complicated as the skills involved in flying a plane.
In fact, it may simply involve using a paper map or asking a fellow citizen for directions. Societal resilience – and thus national security – begins with every citizen.
Elisabeth Braw is a senior associate fellow at the European Leadership Network and a columnist for Foreign Policy.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
