Tests suggest Russian satellites can jam GPS on a continental scale

In September 2025, the researchers sought help from the broader community at the Institute of Navigation conference in Baltimore, Maryland, according to Veritasium. Months later, Humphreys received a breakthrough tip about the raw interference signal data having been captured by stations in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Trondheim, Norway, during an interference event on February 11, 2026. By examining the difference in timing when that signal arrived at the two different stations, Humphreys and Clements calculated a “quasi-hyperboloid surface”—the term they used in the paper—stretching tens of thousands of kilometers into space where the interference satellite must have been located. As explained by Veritasium, the margin of error represented by the thickness of that surface was only five meters. A comparison of suspect satellite orbits with the quasi-hyperboloid surface showed that only one satellite’s orbit aligned perfectly—the Russian satellite Kosmos 2546. That discovery, in turn, pointed them to six satellites in the Russian Edinaya Kosmicheskaya Sistema (EKS) constellation, including Kosmos 2546, which are designed to provide early warnings when they detect ballistic missile launches. Incidentally, the raw data also revealed a second interference burst from the Russian satellites in a lower-frequency band used by China’s BeiDou navigation system. “I can no longer say this is accidental with confidence,” Humphreys told Veritasium. He also described the Russian satellites’ quiet demonstration as a “massive escalation in the electronic warfare background conflict that is going on right now.” But Richard Bowden, division head of assured and resilient PNT at the multinational technology company GMV in Spain, shared a different theory with Veritasium about how the interference bursts may actually represent short communication messages being sent from Russian satellites. Bowden’s team independently identified at least two of the Russian satellites as the source of the GPS interference pattern. “These signals are, without a doubt, intentional and placed on or around GNSS signals, and have the potential to disrupt legitimate use of GNSS services,” Bowden wrote in a LinkedIn comment. “But from our side at least, we can’t be sure they are intentionally malicious or intended as an EW [electronic warfare] weapon.”