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Estonia's Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna has accused neighboring Russia of being responsible for a long-standing GPS signal outage in the Baltic Sea region.

“We know that Russia has been jamming the GPS signal since the beginning of its aggression in Ukraine. “In the past year and a half, this problem has become very serious in our region.”Chanka told Estonian television, according to a radio report on Thursday. This affects not only Estonia, but also Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Poland.

“If we look at Russia’s activities, this attack on GPS is part of a hybrid operation that disrupts our lives and violates all kinds of international agreements,” Tsahkna said. Under the agreement, which Russia has also joined, no one may interfere with the Global Positioning System (GPS). The Estonian Foreign Minister said there was a lot of evidence that the unrest was coming from areas near St. Petersburg, Pskov and Kaliningrad, without providing details.

Aircraft use a Global Positioning System (GPS) signal to determine their location and for navigation. Last weekend, two Finnair planes were forced to divert after GPS interference prevented them from landing in Tartu, Estonia's second-largest city. It is one of the few airports in the area that requires a GPS connection for this purpose. Therefore, the Finnish airline announced that it will initially suspend its flights from Helsinki to Tartu.

After these incidents, the Estonian Consumer Protection and Technical Regulatory Authority (TTJA) investigated GPS interference. Do not assume a deliberate attack on Estonia. According to their assessment, the signal outage is a “side effect” – possibly due to Russia defending its critical infrastructure from attacks and trying to deter drones.

Chakna contradicts this. The Estonian Foreign Minister stressed that if there is an external influence that endangers people's lives and affects aviation, this is not an indirect influence. There is also no rationale or need to jam GPS signals in Norway, Sweden or Finland. Chakna said there were no drone attacks coming from that direction or from Estonia. Russia is clearly testing instead what it can do for the West. (DAP/EPA)