Interesting to see that they are able to identify the specific satellite. I wonder if we can do something now that we know the source.
Working on construction projects on the Romanian coastline (just South of Ukraine) and on the Polish continental waters (just West of Kaliningrad) we experienced jamming on a daily basis.
That jamming near Kaliningrad must surely be impacting the Russian residents as well, right? Unless it is very carefully aimed which seems unlikely since it is also trying to cover a very large volume.
>must surely be impacting the Russian residents as well, right?
They don't give a fuck.
Was watching a youtube video by a russian the other day talking about war & sanction impact and things like ride sharing apps literally say on screen the location is going to be wrong and to select pickup spot manually. It's just assumed to be fucked as a given even at an app development level
Bit of a reach, their internet may be restricted to a degree, but they sure do have internet... my partner calls and video calls their family back in Russia daily from half way around the world.
"Do not ever give up your guns", har-har. In the guerilla stage of the Second Chechen War one of the ways to deal with the insurgents who would barricade in a building was to drive a T-72 to it and fire a couple of HE shells at it. The house would fold in like, well, a house of cards; I believe there even used to be recorded footage on YT. I imagine a single fragmentation shell would be enough for an average American house. My point is, in the modern days having small firearms is not really going to help you against a government who would be willing to use its military on its own territory; you'd need automatic weapons and artillery at the very least, and a lot of foreign funding and training as well. Even then...
okay, let me rephrase that: would it have taken two wars to subdue that tiny, sparsely populated country had that country been armed with nothing but sticks, stones, and Molotov's?
Probably? We can look at the English attempts at "pacifying" Ireland during the XIX and XX century... my point is, if you really need your uprising against a decisive and ruthless government to succeed, you better get foreign backing and a shitload of supplies and training from them, and even then it may be crushed; having small firearms "pre-deployed" amongst the population won't really help all that much.
Not only Poland, they have jammers around St Petersburg as well which affects Finland, there have been reports about boats losing GNSS reception in Swedish waters, etc. This has been going on for years.
The behavior will continue until a consequence is imposed.
Not on regular Russians, mind. Their ruling class. They're still free to move about the continent, make investments, do whatever. Currently Europe seems to be more interested in breaking away from the US than dealing with the power that has killed hundreds of thousands on their own continent.
Maybe there are reasons Europe is pulling away from the US?
The current US president has threatened to invade European territory, is attempting to impose Russia's preferred "peace" plan on Ukraine, and has recently relaxed sanctions on Russia. He also consistently denigrates the military support Europe's given to the US in the recent past. The US has basically cut aid to Ukraine to zero, while Europe continues to supply them, which is currently the best way of dealing with Russia, sucking their military power into a war their not going to win.
When the Russians invaded Georgia in 2008, Europeans inked a deal for a second gas pipeline with them, Nordstream 2. When they annexed Crimea in 2014, Europeans went to the Sochi Olympics (which happened that same year) and went to the World Cup in 2018. And this is before you take into account the dozens of smaller incidents.
Those aren't "threats to invade European territory", not even ones that were ignored by the military. Those were shooting wars that got people killed and redrew the map in Eurasia. Europeans continued to do business with Russia more-or-less unimpeded until 2022. Many Russians still live, work, and do business in the Schengen area.
The US Congress passed a bill to fund Ukraine this week. [0]
The funding bill is never getting past the Senate, and even if it were the money is unlikely to reach Ukraine unless the current admin has a fundamental change of heart.
The (misguided IMO) idea was that buying their gas and integrating them into world markets would strengthen ties and liberalize them in the medium term.
I don't think it was misguided; Nuland-Pyatt leak and the tapping of Merkel's phone made it pretty clear to me that like in the Yeltsin years the problem was that the US didn't want Russia/Europe ties to succeed.
EU had that weird idea that if we just be nice to Russia and tolerate their bullshit for long enough they will warm up to us. Turns out that doesn't really work for country that entire foreign policy could be summed up as "bullying and lying"
I'm sorry but bullshit is what you're talking about. UK took money from Russian oligarchs (that they stole from my pocket) while being perfectly aware of the source, and later pretended they're "fighting" it when the potato got too hot to handle, never returning the invested money and essentially blaming me by proxy, someone who attempted to bring it under control. Germany was happy building pipelines and providing the high precision machines under the corrupt leader colluding with Russia, only breaking ties after the war and making said leader a scapegoat. It was all about your wealth at the cost of my wealth and freedom, you provided most money for the war and Russian elites' superyachts, and profited from it greatly with full awareness of what you're doing, and you were OK with that as long as the costs were externalized. Now you're pretending it was noble peacemaking, an honest mistake, and someone else is to blame. What's worse, you don't seem to learn from either our or your mistakes, willingly building a cage for yourself with a lag of just a few years.
It's not completely true, but there are hundreds of thousands of visas given to Russian tourists each year by European countries, something that's hopefully will get corrected soon.
> According to data cited in Wednesday's letter, which was seen by Reuters, 477,878 Schengen visas were issued to Russian citizens for tourism in 2025, up from 440,558 in 2024.
Europe seems to be interested in neither. As a rule, elites in any country are not concerned about hundreds of thousands of their citizens being killed. I have yet to be proven wrong.
US has got itself compromised by Russia. US president is a Russian asset. Breaking away from unreliable former ally is the logical thing to do for Europe's security.
Funny how Ukraine situation started improving once they have severly limited sharing information with the US.
GPS interference is estimated from ADS-B data which is broadcast by airplanes so that they can be tracked. The lack of data over Ukraine is because their airspace is closed to civilian flights.
Probably because Wester jammers are used from ground and drones have antennas on the top side. For comparison, Russian satellite can jam the signal from above and on a large area. Russian technology is superior.
If Russian GNSS receivers wasn't affected they wouldn't need fiber optic drones, Ukraine is jamming both the small and large drones. Russia have both their own Kometa system to try to filter out the jamming signals, and plenty of Chinese tech as well.
Russian technology is very dependent on both western and Chinese tech, yet they couldn't even defend their own oil refineries in St Petersburg or make any relevant progress along the front in years.
To be fair, USA also could not defend their allies and their bases, and didn't move the frontline in Iran as well. And if Iran buys a submarine capable to launch missiles from a friendly country the situation might get worse.
No one gives a fuck what russian residents are thinking about it. And if they start to talk about issues - police will quickly force everyone to shut up.
Thats true, but its also true that most russians support this war. Maybe they dont say it, but they are the soldiers in the trenches, mechanical engineers building missiles, software developers building their military software, Oil/NG workers that fund the war and so on
The soldiers in the trenches now are mostly recruited from convicts/suspects who want to get a pardon, and volunteers lured by large salary and bonuses, and loan repayment suspension. Most prefer to support the war from the couch.
It's more reasonable to say that the russian people tolerate the war as long as it does not impact their economic situation over a certain tolerance threshold. Almost all of the fighters from the Russian side are on paid voluntary contracts for a reason.
I'm sure that if you ask any of them, they would say that they don't have a choice. Same as western IT developers that continue to support the enshittification of the internet. They don't have a choice. /s
Jamming in general will affect everything using those frequencies (and potentially more besides) in a given area, so if you're using it you're weighing up the effects it'll have on your stuff as well. (early in the current Ukrainian invasion, reportedly Russian electronic warfare units were screwing up their own side more than the Ukrainians)
Russians got used that GPS in Moscow and St. Petersburg often shows wrong position (I did not observe it because I never enable GPS though). We also have mobile Internet shoutdowns which are more annoying than GPS spoofing.
I’ve briefly been somewhere for a few days with significant GPS interference, and yes, basically phone navigation doesn’t work reliably.
For me it was a minor annoyance while driving but presumably any apps that rely heavily on GPS (Uber, food delivery) just wouldn’t work very well or at all
Doesn't sound like you have actually been there. Military is a major employer, but in a territory inhabited since 1944 there are generations of people born there who didn't see a reason to live, the same foreign gastarbeiter as in any Russian city, etc. I.e plenty of ordinary people who could be inconvenienced.
I don't think you meant it like that, but Kaliningrad, or Königsberg is inhabited since a bit longer. For example Immanuel Kant lived and taught there.
Obviously. But since the Russian occupation infamously expelled the natives completely, when I talk about “inhabited since 1945” in the context of people living there now, I’m obviously referring to the Russian population.
>That jamming near Kaliningrad must surely be impacting the Russian residents as well, right?
Russia does not care, nor does it care about its population.
Where are you from?
I ask because you have western privilege, like me, and assume our governments care about its people. Why I lucked out being born in Sweden, the more I learn about the world, the more I am convinced I lucked out ahahaha.
1) with the exception of probably a few pensioners (who also depend on gov’t funding), everyone in the area is dependent on the military. It’s a giant military base in the middle of nowhere.
2) anyone not military (and hence in on it), is a pensioner or the like and won’t give a shit about GPS.
This is not a thriving urban metropolis or tourist location.
Why lie? It _is_ a tourist location, with > 2mln tourists annually (for their 1 mln permanent population). It also has quite a diverse economy, with Avtotor being a major car assembler (though not quite what it was pre-war), a fishing industry, amber mining, a TV manufacturer, &c. With a significant military presence, of course, but "giant military base in the middle of nowhere" is just ridiculous.
The city has half a million residents and the oblast has a million residents. There's restaurants, museums, grocery stores, car dealerships, parks, zoo's, malls, stadiums, factories, train stations, an airport, ports etc etc. It's a real place.
Yeah, same with traveling by boat in the Baltic Sea, been continuously GPS-jammed since 2022 or something annoying like that, basically the entire South East-coast of Sweden been unnavigatable with GPS since then.
>I wonder if we can do something now that we know the source.
Russia signed the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) in 1967, this may be a treaty violation of this or other treaties, something like that or retaliation regarding it may be possible.
You can hack the satellite, or use other electronic warfare options to jam or interfere with it's operations.
You can shoot it down with a missile.
The X-37B is in space right now and interfering with space assets is a pretty obvious possibility for why it exists at all, but it's secret so nobody says these things.
If you start shooting down stuff in orbit, it'll invite retaliation, but even without retaliation there's a huge risk of a Kessler syndrome (especially with all the stuff that SpaceX has put into orbit in recent years).
No, Kessler syndrome is pretty unlikely in this case. All of the guilty satellites are in Molniya orbits. Debris from destroying them would not greatly effect geosynchronous orbit or the low earth orbits used by Starlink.
> especially with all the stuff that SpaceX has put into orbit in recent years
I've heard this repeated a lot but I've never seen anyone do the maths. StarLink satellites are all in very low orbits, so intuitively it seems like most debris from a collision would just end up deorbiting.
LEO is crowded enough (mostly with Starlink) that satellites have to actively maneuver to avoid collisions [1]. There's research [2] arguing that we're probably already in runaway territory in some orbits — that is, debris from 1 collision likely produces more than one secondary collision — we're just way over on the left of the hockey stick curve. A bit of bad luck, or two megaconstellations that don't perfectly coordinate their operations with each other, could move us to the right pretty quickly.
90% of starlink satellites are >400km in altitude. They aren't in very low earth orbits where that intuition even might be correct. They're above the space station.
I've definitely seen math done - though I'd have to dig it up again. I think in FAA filings.
I've thought about this before - do you actually need to "shoot it down" (make it explode)? What if you just nudge it a little and either make it spin or change its orbit? If your missile can reach the satellite then these seem like things that should be possible, no?
Depends, if you nudge it only a little, its own onboard stabilizers / thrusters should be able to correct it. It'd have to be more than its own systems can correct for.
A missile intercept for explosions or a kinetic destruction the relative velocity will be measured in kilometers per second.
A little nudge doesn't do much, it's still a satellite in a substantially similar orbit. Any sort of nudge requires intercept, go up there and match its velocity so you can grab it and push. And still you have to push on it a whole lot to make a meaningful difference. Spin it up? You'd have to do enough to exhaust it's fuel it uses to orient itself.
You're sort of saying if you can chuck an apple hitting a car on the highway, surely you can tow it away to get it off the road. They're significantly different problems.
Working on construction projects on the Romanian coastline (just South of Ukraine) and on the Polish continental waters (just West of Kaliningrad) we experienced jamming on a daily basis.