By Anne Kauranen
HELSINKI (Reuters) – Finland’s Coast Guard said it has detected constant disturbances to satellite navigation signals in the Baltic Sea since April and in recent weeks has seen tankers spoofing their location data to cover up visits to Russia.
Last week, Finland’s interior minister Lulu Ranne said Finland believes Russia is behind disturbances detected in Finland and the Baltic Sea region in the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and GPS (Global Positioning System) signals used in navigation.
The Coast Guard said the GNSS jamming, which it has detected increasingly since April in the Gulf of Finland, has led to ships getting lost at sea or losing their course, leading to close calls in which Finnish authorities have had to alert ships to stop them getting close to islands or shallow waters.
The Coast Guard said the disturbances have led to malfunctions in vessels’ Automatic Identification Systems (AIS), which enable electronic navigation.
“In recent weeks, we have also observed that (AIS) devices have been intentionally turned off, and thus the location information has been spoofed in online location systems…so that an incorrect location is shown for the vessel,” commander Pekka Niittyla of the Gulf of Finland Coast Guard told Reuters.
Russia has previously denied interfering with communication and satellite networks.
Niittyla said the spoofing was a new phenomenon that the Coast Guard has detected around ten times so far by different tankers visiting Russian ports around St Petersburg.
“Based on our assessment, this is related to the evasion of sanctions or their consequences,” he said.
“For example, if a country buying Russian oil does not want to see that the oil was purchased from Russia, the seller or vessel might use spoofing to make it seem like the vessel had not visited Russia.”
The Coast Guard said it believes Russia is jamming the signals to protect its oil ports located in the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland from Ukrainian air strikes or drones.
(Reporting by Anne Kauranen in Helsinki; Editing by Ros Russell)
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