Putin IS behind GPS attacks on passenger flights over Europe: Baltic states and ... trends now
Russia is responsible for GPS jamming that has disrupted thousands of European flights and caused a Finnish air carrier to stop travel to Estonia, the country's Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna has declared.
Finnair announced on Monday it was suspending daily flights to Tartu after two of its planes were forced to turn back to Helsinki when their GPS signals were disrupted.
The European Aviation Safety Agency warned back in January that authorities had seen a 'sharp rise' in jamming in recent months, particularly over the Baltic states, but did not specify the origin of the disruptions.
Then in March, an RAF plane carrying British Defence Secretary Grant Shapps had its signal jammed as it flew near the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad while returning to the UK from Poland.
At the time, military chiefs warned that a secretive Russian system known as Tobol, based in Kaliningrad, could be interfering with signals on planes and boats, causing them to 'malfunction'.
But now Estonian officials believe the most prominent source of the jamming around the Baltics is located in mainland Russia near St Petersburg.
'We have proof that it is coming from Russia, and Russia is violating all the international agreements,' Tsahkna said.
'I'm really sure that they know exactly what they're doing,' he added.
Russia is believed to be responsible for GPS jamming that has disrupted thousands of European flights (satellite image shows suspected jamming station in Kaliningrad
This image purports to show one of the satellite dishes of Russia's secretive Tobol GPS jamming system in Kaliningrad
In March, an RAF plane carrying British Defence Secretary Grant Shapps had its signal jammed as it flew near to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad
Finnair has suspended flights to an airport in Estonia amid GPS jamming concerns
Finnair announced on Monday it was suspending daily flights to Tartu after two of its planes were forced to turn back to Helsinki when their GPS signals were disrupted
'We have proof that it is coming from Russia, and Russia is violating all the international agreements,' Estonia's foreign minister has said of GPS jamming in Europe (Vladimir Putin pictured)
Tsahkna told the BBC his nation had located three sites from which the GPS jamming has emanated - one close to St Petersburg, one in Kaliningrad, and another in Pskov near to the Estonian border.
Though the minister did not offer specifics, open-source investigators also concurred with his assessment, plotting a chart of flight paths of aircraft that had experienced jamming and working to find the intersection where the disruption to signals was most intense.
This method was corroborated by other analysts who performed dozens of drone flights and recorded the positions at which they suffered jamming.
The data compiled from these investigations appears to show a GPS 'black hole' in a position south-west of St Petersburg where a number of Russian military bases are located, suggesting one or several of these bases are likely the primary source of the jamming attacks.
Jamming systems, such as the 'Tobol' platform believed to be in use in Kaliningrad, typically work by generating and then transmitting a signal on
