r/CredibleDefense • u/AutoModerator • 8d ago

Active Conflicts & News Megathread September 01, 2025

The r/CredibleDefense daily megathread is for asking questions and posting submissions that would not fit the criteria of our post submissions. As such, submissions are less stringently moderated, but we still do keep an elevated guideline for comments.

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54

u/adfjsdfjsdklfsd 8d ago edited 8d ago

A few days after bombing the representations of the UK and the European Union in Kiev, Russia has now spoofed the GPS of the plane carrying Ursula von der Leyen on a tour visiting several "frontline states" to reaffirm Europe's commitment to defend Ukraine and itself against Russia.

While nothing happened, apart from the pilots needing to switch to manual navigation, this seems to illustrate a new Russian strategy of confronting Europe more directly.

I just wonder: for what reason? I can't help but notice the close temporal proximity to the Alaska meeting. So is this born out of boldness, seeing an opportunity to fracture European will and to dissuade Europe it from further support to Ukraine - or out of desperation, recognising that Russia's window of opportunity is rapidly closing?

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u/shash1 8d ago

Its posturing. Great for domestic headlines. Risk free. Cost is minimal.

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u/adfjsdfjsdklfsd 8d ago

It carries the risk that Europe will double down on it's rearmament efforts and support for Ukraine. That would be pretty costly.

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u/FriedRiceistheBest 7d ago

It carries the risk that Europe will double down on it's rearmament efforts and support for Ukraine.

3 years in and everyone knows that Europe will not do that.

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u/adfjsdfjsdklfsd 7d ago

Europe is doing both of those things, what are you talking about?

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u/bearfan15 7d ago

Most nato countries have not committed to anything meaningful. Of the ones that have, im very skeptical they will meet those targets. Especially Germany.

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u/OldBratpfanne 8d ago

Maybe in theory, but in practice this action isn’t changing anyone’s mind. No European country is going to significant adjust their defense spending or Ukraine support upwards because of an incident like this.

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u/ChornWork2 7d ago

We know that russia won't escalate if west arms ukraine, and russia knows europe won't escalate if they do these relatively trivial events of interference.

Would be much better off had just armed ukraine to defeat russian advances years ago.

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u/Elim_Garak_Multipass 7d ago

By now we are at the point where if they coulda, they woulda. All the proclamations about unity and strength and existential battle for the freedom of Europe and domino theories about Poland or the Baltics or whoever else being next if Ukraine falls has led us to where we are.

All that's left now are the same domestically impossible options of cutting the welfare states to massively rearm (and/or funnel some portion of that to Ukraine), committing European soldiers in large enough numbers to matter to potential war against Russia, cratering an already stagnant economy by issuing secondary sanctions against countries trading with Russia etc.

None of those are plausible, regardless of how many eurocrat planes Putin messes with. Or no matter of much of Ukraine he conquers, for that matter. You think the French citizenry is going to accept pension cuts to save Ukraine or punish Putin for anything short of nuking Paris?

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u/Electrical-Lab-9593 8d ago

is GPS jamming targeted, I assumed is more like area denial ? and baltics/finland etc complain of jamming in the past

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u/TryingToBeHere 7d ago

Yeah, I thought like all of the Baltics and much of the rest of Eastern Europe were subject to constant Russian GPS jamming.

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u/RobotWantsKitty 7d ago

Flightradar24:

We are seeing media reports of GPS interference affecting the plane carrying Ursula von der Leyen to Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Some reports claim that the aircraft was in a holding pattern for 1 hour.

This is what we can deduce from our data.

  • The flight was scheduled to take 1 hour and 48 minutes. It took 1 hour and 57 minutes.
  • The aircraft's transponder reported good GPS signal quality from take-off to landing.

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u/anonymfus 7d ago

The aircraft's transponder reported good GPS signal quality from take-off to landing.

Which is pretty much expected if GPS spoofing was the case, because the whole concept of spoofing is based on aircraft's inability to distinguish between real and spoofed GPS signals, as opposed to GPS jamming when attacked aircraft may notice an increase in noise-to-signal ratio and eventual signal loss.

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u/RobotWantsKitty 7d ago

The Politico article doesn't say that spoofing took place, I don't know why OP said that it did

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u/carkidd3242 7d ago edited 7d ago

An actual airline pilot will have to comment here, but ADS-B what is self-reporting is the quality of the positioning reporting of the aircraft, which is not necessarily only provided by GPS. The Dassault Falcon 900EX she was in could have instantly failed over to a combination of INS and automatic triangulation by ground navigation signals and never have actually lost quality position reporting despite losing access to GPS.

The jet, which was chartered by the European Commission for the trip, was unable to use electronic navigational aids as a result of the interference while approaching the airport at Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second-largest city.

"Air Traffic Services immediately proposed an alternative landing approach using ground-based navigation aids (Instrument Landing System). The ground-based navigation aids used in Bulgaria are independent of GPS systems," a press release from the Bulgarian government said.

The best way to verify this story would be the ATC radio transcripts.

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u/adfjsdfjsdklfsd 7d ago

The radio comms of the incident have been posted on X/Twitter

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u/kevloral 6d ago

I have looked it up and the recording in that tweet can be found in the LiveATC archives: https://www.liveatc.net/archive.php?m=lbsf2_lbpd_twr

Day: August 31

Select a time (GMT/UTC): 1430-1500Z

And then start listening at 4:25