Poland’s National Institute of Telecommunications reported a sharp escalation in deliberate GNSS interference around the Tri-City area — Gdańsk, Gdynia and Sopot — with data from its Gdańsk monitoring station showing disruption on nearly two-thirds of days so far this month.
The institute, in an August 26 analysis, said interference across all GNSS frequency bands has increased steadily and drastically since the start of 2026, appearing both as multi-hour, full-spectrum outages and as narrower disruptions confined to a single band. Roman Młodkowski of the institute told the Polish Press Agency the interference has taken both forms throughout the year.
The institute’s monitoring station has tracked interference anomalies in the region since January 2024, but 2026 marked a substantial deterioration. Partial interference affected 48% of days and total interference 6% of days across the year to date, with the disruption rate climbing to between 39% and 70% of days during the May-through-August stretch.
May and June were the worst months recorded, with significant multi-hour, all-band interference on 70% of days in each month; only 10% of days in May and 13% in June were entirely free of disruption. The first 19 days of August saw full-band interference on 63% of days, meaning satellite navigation for phones and civilian receivers failed on roughly two out of every three days.
The institute attributed the interference to external electronic-warfare activity in the Baltic Sea region and said it expects the disruption to continue for as long as that activity persists. It stopped short of naming a source nation in this analysis, but the country’s Civil Aviation Authority told the International Civil Aviation Organization in July 2025 that interference affecting the Baltic Sea and northern and eastern Europe originated from Russian territory, and researchers from Gdynia Maritime University and Germany’s Aerospace Center have traced Baltic GNSS disruptions to Russian electronic-warfare installations in Kaliningrad’s Okunevo antenna complex and the Baltiysk area. The ICAO Council subsequently called on Russia to halt the interference, a call Russia has not heeded.
The institute said the disruption affects smartphone and consumer GPS navigation, shared transport systems including city bikes, scooters and some municipal fleet operations, and poses elevated risk to recreational and commercial drone operations due to sudden loss of position stabilization. It advised residents and visitors in the Tri-City area not to rely solely on mobile mapping apps, recommending traditional navigation methods or offline maps as a backup.
