Russia’s Pawprints on Aircraft Jamming Outbreak - April 30, 2024
Russia’s suspected jamming of satellite navigation systems is getting worse, and having an increasingly serious affect across the Baltic.
 
Two Finnair aircraft flying from Helsinki to the Estonian city of Tartu in March had to turn around due to global positioning system (GPS) jamming, the latest in a growing series of incidents that have raised safety fears about flights in the region. The jammer is thought to be in Russian territory to the west of St Petersburg.
 
In recent months what used to be low-level jamming has dramatically increased.
 
“If someone turns off your headlights while you’re driving at night, it gets dangerous.,” Lithuania’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, told the Financial Times. “Things in the Baltic region near Russian borders are now getting too dangerous to ignore.”
 
Most aircraft have alternative systems to keep them safe, but some airports like Tartu have satellite-only landing systems. While there has been no official confirmation about the jammer’s location, open source intelligence (OSINT) researcher Markus Jonsson, who monitors GPS jamming in the Baltic Sea region, located the suspected jammer halfway between the Estonian border city of Narva and St. Petersburg.
 
In recent weeks, Jonsson has identified jammers in other parts of western Russia. While the motivation behind the attacks or the perpetrator cannot be definitively established, the Russian military is probably “trying to protect Kaliningrad from potential attacks by Ukrainian drones”, a Western official told the Financial Times.
 
Whether the jamming constitutes intentional aggression or is an accidental consequence of military activity is unclear, but the distinction matters as the affected countries consider how to respond. A similar scenario presented itself in September 2017, during Russia’s massive Zapad exercise in its westernmost regions, and again during NATO’s Trident Juncture exercise, held in Norway in October 2018.
 
GPS in northern Norway and Finland experienced disruption, airliners had to navigate manually, and smartphone users could no longer trust their phone maps and location services. The Norwegian airline Wideroe reported a loss of GPS signal in its airplanes flying in northern Norway.
 
In recent months, the GPS jamming has intensified with tens of thousands of flights affected, and some ships too. In the days immediately after Christmas, interference went from its typical green range, which indicates it’s below 2% of traffic, to red, which indicates it’s above 10%.
 
A commercial airline being forced to abandon a route as a result of GPS interference is no small thing  — but it’s also not an act of war. Indeed, Finland, Estonia, and other Baltic Sea region countries are likely to struggle to prove that the Russian government was behind the interference and that it was intentional. Without such proof, any retaliation against Russia would be reckless.
 
That’s the nature of gray zone aggression: those targeted know it’s real, and it causes real harm. Yet because it’s not an act of outright military aggression, indeed sometimes deniable, the affected country has painfully limited ways to respond, let alone retaliate. Liberal democracies whose airlines are harmed by GPS jamming are simply not going to harm the suspected perpetrator’s airliners in response.
 
But NATO has a resilience paragraph — Article 3 of the North Atlantic Treaty. “The parties will work together to develop and maintain their ability to resist armed attacks through mutual aid and self-help,” it states.
 
Some of that is already happening. This now needs to include much stronger private-sector participation. Indeed, airlines like Finnair will have insights they can share with airlines that have so far not had the misfortune of experiencing GPS jamming. It could prove very useful in the future.
 
Elisabeth Braw is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.
 
Source: https://cepa.org/article/russias-pa [...] -outbreak/

L'armée russe en Ukraine viole une interdiction internationale sur l'utilisation d'armes chimiques, a annoncé mercredi le Département d'État américain.
 
Selon le Département d'État, sur le champ de bataille, les forces russes utilisent de la chloropicrine, un agent asphyxiant et lacrymogène interdit par l'Organisation pour l'interdiction des armes chimiques (OIAC).
 
Utilisée pour la première fois par l'Allemagne pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, la chloropicrine est un liquide dont les vapeurs affectent la peau et les muqueuses et provoquent, à des concentrations élevées, des convulsions incontrôlables des muscles du diaphragme.
 
L'utilisation de tels produits chimiques par l'armée russe n'est pas un épisode isolé  et découle probablement d'un désir de « déloger les forces ukrainiennes des positions fortifiées et de réaliser des gains tactiques sur le champ de bataille », a noté le Département d'État.
 
#Russie #Ukraine #NAFO #Felas

Video of Sergei Shoigu with Gerasimov during a visit to the Joint Group of Forces HQ being shown Mavic and FPV munitions and three-linked PKT machine guns with a large collimator optic for countering UAVs.
 
https://t.me/zvezdanews/142442

Russian forces have gained tactically near Ocheretyne and Chasiv Yar, and have attempted a large assault towards Sivers'k. Frontelligence Insight provides a concise analysis of the current situation in this thread
 
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Les premiers Géorgiens à entrer en relation avec la culture française semblent avoir été Nikoloz Philéli et Pharsadan Kartsikhéli : ils remettent en 1460 à Charles VII (roi de France) une lettre de Georges VIII de Géorgie3. Cinq siècles plus tard, de jeunes aristocrates et des révolutionnaires viennent chercher les lumières françaises à Paris4,5. Une partie de l’intelligentsia géorgienne s'est tournée vers la culture française, même si une autre partie -non moins importante- se tourne vers la culture allemande...

Je précise : les premières forces russes sont stationnées en Ossétie du Sud à 1h00 de Tbilissi. Aucune invasion à cette heure…

La tentative de déstabilisation russe est en route. Moscou ne renonce pas à son ancien empire.Les premières forces russes sont à 1h00 de Tbilissi…
 
En Géorgie, la répression commence, après le discours antioccidental des autorités – via  
@lemondefr