Bulgarian authorities have said they suspect Russia of jamming the GPS system of the jet carrying the EU Commission president on Sunday.
If someone deliberately jams your jet’s GPS, it’s fair to assume they are trying to threaten or intimidate you.
The Kremlin hasn’t responded to Sky News but its spokesperson told the Financial Times “your information is incorrect”, when asked about the allegations.
However, the timing of the alleged interference is interesting.
It happened as the EU is preparing its 19th sanctions package on Russia, and European leaders are discussing what security guarantees they can offer Ukraine while also trying to persuade the US to get tough.
It also came as EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen was on a four-day tour of member states that border or are near to Russia.
She was seeing “first-hand the everyday challenges of threats coming from Russia and its proxies”, according to her spokesperson.
These threats are part of the hybrid war that numerous European leaders, generals and the NATO chief have repeatedly warned about since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
The hybrid attacks they accuse Moscow of carrying out range from cyber attacks to suspected attempts to spy on NATO bases.
I remember Lieutenant General Andre Bodemann, head of Germany’s homeland defence command, vividly laying out some of the challenges being faced when I interviewed him last year.
“We have a lot of hybrid threats: that’s fake news, disinformation, cyber attacks, espionage and sabotage… We see drones over my operations cell, for example, we even saw explosives in the vicinity of the NATO pipeline,” he said.
These types of alleged attacks have continued and are expected to escalate as the EU puts more pressure on Moscow, according to experts.
Last week, a security source told me that they were aware of several unidentified drones monitoring NATO members’ troop movements as they travelled through eastern Germany and the state of Thuringia to the eastern front to transport ammunition to Ukraine.
