Russia Accused of Jamming Radar on EU Chief’s Plane Over Bulgaria

Russia is suspected of conducting an interference attack that disabled the GPS on a plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, forcing it to land at a Bulgarian airport.

The plane landed safely at Plovdiv Airport on Aug. 31, and Von der Leyen will continue her planned tour of European Union nations bordering Russia and Belarus, commission spokesperson Arianna Podesta said on Sept. 1.

“We can indeed confirm that there was GPS jamming, but the plane landed safely in Bulgaria,” Podesta said. “We have received information from the Bulgarian authorities that they suspect that this was due to blatant interference by Russia.”

In a statement, Bulgarian authorities said: “The satellite signal used for the aircraft’s GPS navigation was disrupted. As the aircraft approached Plovdiv Airport, the GPS signal was lost.”

EU officials confirmed the story, first reported by The Financial Times, which stated that the GPS jamming deprived Von der Leyen’s plane of electronic navigational aids while on approach to the city’s airport.

The plane had to land using paper maps.

A spokesman from the Bulgarian government told The Epoch Times in an email that there was a “neutralization” of the satellite signal supplying information to the aircraft’s GPS navigation system.

“The ground-based navigation systems used by Bulgaria are independent of GPS systems and allow for safe and reliable landings,” he said, according to an English translation of the original text. “We also clarify that there was no need to divert the flight. According to the pre-planned and coordinated program with the [European Commission] team, the landing was scheduled at Plovdiv Airport.”

Von der Leyen, a major critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, visited Bulgaria on Aug. 31. During the visit, she praised the country, whose largest private employer is a defense company.

“Here, you are producing large quantities of ammunition … which is supporting Ukraine in its fight for freedom,” she said in a statement with Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov on Aug. 31. “At the beginning of [the] war, one third of the weapons used in Ukraine was coming from Bulgaria.

“Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine is in its fourth year. It is obvious that Putin will not stop there. He has created full-scale yet old-fashioned war economy, precisely because of the biting sanctions that we imposed and he will continue to produce at large scale.

“Everywhere in Europe, we are speeding up the production of ammunition. … The times we live in call for it. Our production capacity should reach 2 million shells by the end of this year.”

According to Flightradar24, GPS jamming involves saturating GPS receivers with “unknown signals to render the receiver unusable, essentially degrading everyone’s ability to effectively use GPS for navigational purposes.”

UK defense and security think tank Royal United Services Institute has claimed that the Russians use a system known as Tobol-M, which can interfere with GPS and other systems across a large area.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied The Financial Times’ report, saying, “Your information is incorrect.”

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.