Inside the air traffic control tower at Tallinn Airport in Estonia’s capital, a team tracks pilots in training as they fly above the Tartu airport, which lies about 200 kilometres south of Tallinn, and about 45 kilometres west of Russia.
As the screen displays the location of the flights underway, a voice comes over the radio asking for permission to descend from the 1,800 metres she is currently flying at, because the GPS signal used for navigation has suddenly disappeared.
“Jammers are working pretty much 24/7,” said Mihkel Haug, head of the air traffic control department with Estonian Air Navigation Services.
“We get incident reports every day from pilots. In April, it was more than 600.”
Cases of GPS jamming, which is when strong radio signals drown out or interfere with satellite navigation systems, have surged since 2022, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Incidents have increased in Estonia, which resulted in Finnair temporarily cancelling flights to the city of Tartu because they lost access to GPS before landing.
Reports have also spiked around the Black Sea, which is bordered by six countries, including Ukraine, Turkey and Russia.
While aviation and security experts tell CBC News the jamming is concerning, they say it alone doesn’t automatically create dangerous situations, as pilots are able to rely on other navigation aids.
However, there is more worry about the increase in GPS spoofing, which is being seen in Europe and in the Middle East. Spoofing is when fake signals can trick navigation systems into thinking they are somewhere else, potentially directing a plane off course.
Aviation groups say the significant rise in GPS disturbance can pose a safety risk, and the industry is grappling with how to mitigate the challenges that have spiked as result of global conflicts.
Finnair flights cancelled
In Estonia, Haug says that wherever a pilot reports the GPS navigation system is down, air traffic controllers stay on high alert, tracking the flight closely to make sure it doesn’t deviate from its planned route.
In late April, over the course of two evenings, two Finnair flights had to return to Helsinki after their GPS navigation system stopped working and there wasn’t a certified alternative navigation system in place for landing. They lost access to their navigation system when they were flying at around 3,600 metres.
Haug says usually when planes descend, the GPS system resumes working, but in this case it didn’t happen. At the time, Tartu airport, which is small and has its air traffic control handled remotely by Tallinn, solely relied on GPS navigation for landing approaches.
In both cases, Finnair decided to divert the planes back to Helsinki and shelve the route until additional navigation tools could be put in place.
After Estonian Air Navigation Services confirmed that a ground based beacon — part of what is known as Distance Measuring Equipment — would work as a secondary navigation at lower altitudes, Finnair made the decision to resume flights.
Pointing the blame at Russia
Estonian officials blame Russia for interfering with the GPS navigation systems and summoned the head of the Russian embassy in Tallinn earlier this month.
While Estonia’s Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna has accused Russia of violating international regulations as part of its “hybrid” warfare, Marek Kohv, a Tallinn based security expert, says the jamming is likely “collateral damage.”
“Russia is trying to avoid Ukrainian drones attacking their critical infrastructure and military facilities,” said Kohv, who is head of the security and resilience programme at Estonia’s International Centre for Defence and Security.
Marek Kohv, a security expert at Estonia’s International Centre for Defence and Security, explains how GPS jamming in Russia is impacting flights in Estonia.
In recent months, Ukraine has stepped up attacks on Russian oil refineries, and sites on the Crimean peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014.
According to reporting by Reuters, Russian jamming has been able to fend off strikes from glide bombs, which Ukraine acquired from the U.S.
Sources told Reuters that the Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSD) has a navigation system that allows it to steer around obstacles, but it has been targeted by Russian jamming.
Online, the website GPSJAM aggregates daily reports of GPS interference, and colour codes geographic areas that are seeing a high rate of jamming.
Dark red and purple sections cover parts of Estonia, while a large area around St. Petersburg, Russia, is shaded, along with the Russian city of Pskov, which lies further south.
Kohv says he thinks that the jamming affecting Tartu comes from Pskov, which lies about 110 kilometres away, and is home to an elite Russian military unit — the 76th Air Assault Division.
In recent months, Ukraine has stepped up attacks on Russian oil refineries, and sites on the Crimean peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014.
Online mapping shows there is currently a high rate of jamming around the city of Sevastopol in Crimea.
“Although it’s not an attack toward us per say, it still shows you how Russia operates,” said Kohv.
“It doesn’t care about international agreements and collateral damage.”
Jamming and spoofing in the Middle East
But Russia’s war on Ukraine isn’t the only conflict that has led to an increase of GPS jamming and spoofing.
In the fall of last year, OPSGROUP, an aviation advisory body, highlighted a surge in GPS spoofing around the Middle East, including Iraq, Iran and Israel and the Black Sea.
In one case, the group reported that a plane flying in Iraq nearly entered Iranian airspace without clearance after its navigation systems were “targeted with fake GPS signals.”
In another instance, a large business jet had what OPSGROUP called critical navigation failure upon taking off from Tel Aviv at the end of October.
The aircraft temporarily went off course as the GPS system thought it was more than 400 kilometres south of its actual position� on departure from Tel Aviv, leading the aircraft toward Lebanon.
“Starting from September, we started to receive a lot of reports of spoofing. That was very new to us,” said Cyrille Rosay, a senior cybersecurity expert at the European Union Aviation Safety Agency who spoke to CBC News from Cologne, Germany.
He said in one case, a crew got a fake alert that they needed to pull up because the plane was close to the ground, even though they were in fact very high in altitude.
In January, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), along with the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) organized a meeting in Germany that included airlines, manufacturers and regulatory bodies to try and address the growing problem.
In a statement issued after the meeting, the IATA and the EASA said that GPS interference can “pose significant challenges to aviation safety.”
In the short term, officials say that the aviation industry needs to ensure that pilots and crews know the risks and how to respond to them using alternative navigation systems. They add that there needs to be more work to adapt the certification requirements for navigation and landing systems, and more input from the aviation industry when it comes to designing them.
“We are looking at a big list of possible solutions,” said Rasay, who adds that while GPS interference may have an impact on safety in certain circumstances, he doesn’t think it has made it unsafe overall.
He compares it to flying in stormy weather.
“You can fly in stormy conditions … but for any stormy condition there’s an increase of risk to safety.”
“But that doesn’t mean it’s unsafe to fly.”
Published at Sat, 25 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000
Ukraine to allow some prisoners to enter army, as Kyiv focuses on finding needed recruits
Could Ukraine really look to its prisons to field thousands of new recruits for its war with Russia?
It’s a possibility, after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed legislation last week allowing certain convicts to enlist. Several thousand prisoners are now asking to be let into the army, according to Ukraine’s deputy justice minister, Olena Vysotska.
As the war grinds into its third year, Ukraine has struggled to find the additional soldiers it needs. To get more people in uniform, the government has lowered its draft age, increased fines for draft dodgers and reminded Ukrainian men abroad of their obligations.
But the decision to allow convicts — excluding those involved in particular serious crimes — to join the army is an indication that Kyiv is willing to cast a wider net to meet its wartime personnel needs. How far that will go in boosting its ranks remains to be seen.
“The army of Ukraine is facing an increasingly acute problem of personnel shortages, and the involvement of prisoners can slightly reduce the acuteness of this problem,” Andrii Kharuk, a Ukrainian military historian, said via email.
Russia’s approach
Ukraine’s need for soldiers comes amid ongoing Russian attacks on the northeastern Kharkiv region, a situation that has commanded Kyiv’s attention in recent weeks and necessitated sending reinforcements. Regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said Friday that authorities have evacuated more than 11,000 people since the Russian attacks started on May 10.
The motivations for Russia’s actions in the northeast have several possible explanations: Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed Moscow wants to create a buffer zone, while some analysts suggest Russia’s Kharkiv actions may be intended to divert focus from other parts of the front line.
Russia has a population more than three times that of Ukraine, providing an advantage in numbers when it comes to drafting potential soldiers. Yet it has also been sending Russian prisoners to Ukraine for much of the all-out invasion.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late founder of the paramilitary Wagner Group, made headlines in 2022 when video surfaced showing him making a direct appeal to inmates to earn their freedom by fighting in Ukraine. He claimed to have recruited tens of thousands of men from Russian prisons.
Russia continues to send convicts into battle, though some reports suggest Moscow has dialled back the terms offered to those who serve. It has also seen headline-making incidents of violence on its side of the border, involving prisoners-turned-soldiers who returned home after serving in Ukraine.
A change for Ukraine
Kharuk, the military historian, said Kyiv had its reasons for not looking to prison populations for potential recruits earlier in the conflict.
“In my opinion, at the beginning of the war, Ukraine failed to mobilize prisoners for ethical reasons,” said Kharuk, who is also a humanities professor at Hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi National Army Academy in Lviv, Ukraine.
The six-month delay on the U.S. military aid package has led to tactical disadvantages for Ukraine, says Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal. Shmyhal talks about the country’s relationship with NATO and Canada’s support for Ukraine during the war.
“Against the background of the mass recruitment of prisoners into the Russian army, it was important to demonstrate that Ukraine interprets service in the army as an honourable duty of a citizen, and not as a way to avoid punishment for criminal penalties.”
Kyiv officials say roughly 20,000 prisoners could be eligible to pursue this route to military service, though only a fraction are expected to do so.
Two of the earliest men cleared to fight are convicted thieves who were ordered released for this purpose, Agence France-Presse reported this week. A further 50 prisoners were released so they could join the army, the Kyiv Independent reported Friday.
The British experience from long ago
A century before the current war in Ukraine, there was another land war in Europe that demanded ever-more troops be sent into the fray.
That was the First World War, a conflict that claimed millions of lives, including those of 880,000 British forces.
Britain would end up sending convicts into the fight as the war progressed, just as Ukraine is considering today.
Cameron McKay has studied this history closely and written about how Britain came to understand it would need to source a lot more men to fight than were available at the war’s outset.
“Manpower shortages were certainly a determinant in allowing criminals to enlist,” McKay, a historian, explained via email.
“At the beginning of the war, defendants who offered to enlist rather than be sent to prison were usually told no. However, as the war progressed, defendants were increasingly allowed to enlist.”
According to his research, decision-makers in Britain saw various advantages in letting prisoners serve in the army. These included military service being viewed “as an opportunity for redemption, whilst also reducing the prison population,” McKay said.
Unlike the situation in modern Ukraine, however, Britain allowed violent offenders to enlist.
Some of the arguments made against their enlistment revolved around possible resentment from fellow soldiers.
“It was also widely believed at the time that criminals lacked the selflessness needed for military service, although their readiness to enlist proved otherwise,” McKay said.
Pressures on Kyiv
Oxana Shevel, an associate professor of political science at Boston’s Tufts University, said the unpredictable nature of the war creates challenges for a government in Kyiv that must decide who must join the fight.
Shevel notes that the action of “conscripting a lot of people who may not want to be conscripted is not a super popular move,” however necessary it may be for Kyiv’s war effort. There are also unresolved issues about so-called demobilization, as some of Ukraine’s soldiers have been on the front line for two-plus years, with no end in sight to their military service.
The Ukrainian-born Shevel does not see Kyiv’s decision to allow prisoners into the military as particularly controversial, given that those convicted of serious crimes are excluded from service. And it’s asking them to take on the same risks as anyone else helping to defend Ukraine.
More generally, Shevel said political leaders in Kyiv have had to make ongoing hard choices about who to call up to the military, while balancing other considerations, such as the demographic and economic impacts that conscription poses.
But she said they’ve also been clear about why they can’t avoid making those decisions, either, given the costs of failing to stop Russia.
“The invading army is not going to care about anybody’s human rights,” Shevel said.
Published at Sat, 25 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000
