Ukraine apologized to Lithuania on Sunday after its drones may have strayed into Lithuanian airspace during an operation against Russian military targets. Ukraine’s foreign ministry said the incident “may have resulted from Russian electronic warfare” diverting the drones. The apology comes as Lithuania’s communications regulator reported that Russia has expanded GPS spoofing infrastructure in its Kaliningrad exclave from three antennae in early 2025 to 36 now, with a falsification range of up to 450 km.
Spoofing at operational scale
The reported expansion matters. Darius Kuliesius, deputy head of Lithuania’s regulator, told Reuters that spoofing capability could now reach across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, most of Poland, parts of Finland, Sweden and Belarus, and the Baltic Sea. The regulator estimated the range by analyzing disturbances in aviation surveillance ADS-B transmissions. Kuliesius said the interference, which began occasionally during the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, has become “systemic, permanent, unending Russian provocation against European security.” Russia has frequently denied accusations of electronic interference.
Civil systems are affected too. Kuliesius said spoofing and jamming intensify during Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia, degrading mobile phone networks near Kaliningrad and disrupting GPS-dependent services. “Online bus schedules in Klaipeda stop working during the spikes, because they rely on tracking buses by GPS,” he said, referring to a town 50 km from the Kaliningrad border.
Air-defense friction under ambiguity
The incident illustrates how electronic warfare magnifies the already difficult choices for both drone operators and NATO air defenders. On May 19, a Romanian NATO fighter jet shot down a suspected Ukrainian drone over Estonia after it entered the country’s airspace from Russia. The Estonian military said the incident occurred “under the conditions of heavy electronic warfare, including GPS spoofing and jamming, by Russia.” Latvia issued an air threat alert the same day after a drone entered its airspace, leading to train suspensions, stoppage of national examinations for ninth-grade students, and closure of grocery shops. When a drone’s position feed can be falsified, defenders face ambiguous contact: shoot, shadow, or stand down?
Recovery requires an independent path
The engineering lesson is clear: systems that rely solely on their primary navigation and control links have no way to tell whether those links are lying. When the primary path is compromised – whether by spoofing, jamming, or hijacking – operators need an independent way back in. The Stormfire patent family describes a two-step recovery process over an alternate channel: first, an authenticated command cuts off the compromised primary path; then, over the same alternate channel, the operator sends further authenticated commands to direct or disable the vehicle.
Spoofing at scale turns navigation into a contested resource. Ambiguity becomes operational risk, and recovery – not just defense – becomes part of the mission design.
Related coverage: Kyiv apologizes again as Russia diverts Ukrainian drones into Baltic states; what is GPS spoofing – The Times of India