I’m honestly surprised this has not received more attention in Europe. The most vivid public example was around the EU’s northeastern flank, with Poland and the Baltic region among the most affected areas. To my knowledge, this may be the first publicly documented wartime case of a space-based EW capability being demonstrated or tested.
GPS and GNSS interference over Europe is starting to look like something far more serious than local outages, random radio noise, or classic ground-based jamming. Part of it may be linked to active electromagnetic emissions from Russian satellites. If that assessment holds, this is no longer just a technical issue. It becomes a question of national security, infrastructure resilience, and policy toward systems that are critical in aviation, shipping, energy, telecommunications, military operations, and precise timing.
Researchers analyzed data from ground-based GNSS stations and found short interference pulses appearing at the same time across a vast area, from Europe to Greenland and Canada. That scale does not fit a local source on the ground. It points to an object high above Earth, with the geometry needed to illuminate a large part of the continent.
The signal appeared very close to GPS L1, the core GPS band used by millions of civilian receivers. Its peak was around 1577.5 MHz, while GPS L1 sits at 1575.42 MHz, with a bandwidth of roughly 5 MHz. The data also showed a second burst around 1558.5 MHz, in a band used by China’s BeiDou system. In practice, receivers saw simultaneous drops in signal quality across GPS, Galileo, and BeiDou, in some places by about 10 dB.
The key attribution to Russian Cosmos 2546 satellite came from comparing the arrival time of the pulse at two stations. Researchers used that time difference to define a quasi-hyperboloid surface in space, meaning the surface on which the source of the emission had to be located. When they compared that surface with the orbits of suspect objects, the best match was Kosmos 2546, a Russian early-warning satellite in a Molniya orbit.