Ben Pawlowski
A MILITARY aircraft carrying Spain’s defence minister suffered a ‘GPS disturbance’ near a Russian enclave just days after a spate of incursions into NATO airspace, Spanish officials have said.
Margarita Robles, a key ally of prime minister Pedro Sanchez, was heading to Lithuania for a bilateral meeting with her counterpart Dovile Sakaliene on Wednesday morning when her jet’s navigation system was attacked.
The incident took place while the Airbus A330 military plane, which was also carrying relatives of Spanish airmen carrying out missions on NATO’s eastern flank plus a host of journalists, was flying near Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea between Lithuania and Poland.
Robles is far from the first high-profile European figure whose jet has been targeted by suspected Russian GPS jammers.
Last month, pilots navigating a plane carrying European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen were forced to land using paper maps after an attack, widely believed to be Russian-led, disabled GPS services at an airport in Bulgaria.
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Wednesday’s flight carrying Robles was able to carry on as normal because the aircraft receives navigation data from a military satellite, according to El Mundo.
A Spanish defence spokesperson said: “There has been an attempt to disrupt the GPS signal, but as our aircraft has an encrypted system, it was not affected.”
Speaking at a joint press conference with Sakaliene after touching down in Lithuania, Robles said the attack would not ‘break the will of Spain or any of the countries of the Atlantic alliance to continue working for peace and coexisting in peace’.
Pointing the finger squarely at Russia, Robles defended ‘the right of all of us to travel and fly freely throughout European territory without interference from everyone knows who, as we experienced this morning’.
“We have to be aware that the threat is real,” added Sakaliene, who revealed such incidents are common onboard both military and commercial aircraft flying near Kaliningrad.
The incident comes just days after repeated Russian incursions of NATO military airspace on the alliance’s eastern front, with Polish prime minister Donald Tusk warning that direct confrontation was closer ‘than at any time since the Second World War’.
The spate of incursions began on September 10 when 19 Russian drones flew over Poland. Four of the devices were shot down.
Three days later, a drone was detected in Romanian airspace before three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets entered Estonian airspace for twelve minutes on Friday.
On Monday, Denmark and Norway were both forced to close their main airports after drone incursions, with Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, saying she ‘cannot rule out’ Russian involvement.
The repeated incursions have raised fears of a future confrontation that could spill out into all-out war – embroiling both Spain and the UK.
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