@auonsson and other OSINT investigators believe they’ve now found the culprit: a GPS jammer in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
Speaking with retired Major General Gunnar Karlson, a former chief of Sweden’s military intelligence agency, I asked what Russia’s objective here might be, if it turns out to be the originator. “One reason for the interference is, of course, the usual hybrid [aggression] reason: to stress us out in different ways,” he said. “It may also be that they want to signal deterrence by showing us examples of the damage they could cause if they wanted to.”
And with modern economies relying on GPS for daily activities, the prospect of such interference is certainly frightening. (Yes, pilots and mariners know how to navigate manually and with older technology, but it’s a lot more cumbersome.)
If all this is emanating from Russia, the GPS interference also brings the Kremlin another benefit: It can, as Karlson pointed out, “gain knowledge of what we do to counteract, which can give an advantage in the battle between means and countermeasures. In addition, of course, the Russians also learn a lot by using their technical resources for interference, which allows them to optimize.”
There’s also the possibility that Russia may just want to boil the GPS frog, as it were. By getting the populations of Sweden, Germany and Poland (and now also Denmark) used to GPS interference, it may figure we won’t immediately notice when it ramps interference up to the point of danger.
Authorities in Sweden, Germany, Poland and Denmark are now investigating — much as the governments of Sweden and Denmark have been investigating the Nord Stream pipeline explosions in their Exclusive Economic Zones, and the governments of Sweden, Finland and Estonia have been investigating the mysterious damage caused to two undersea cables and one pipeline last year.