Allegations that Russia jammed the private jet of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen during a flight near Bulgaria gripped European political and security circles this week, only for the claims to unravel under scrutiny within days. The incident, which initially appeared to be a provocative act of hybrid warfare, has since been downplayed by officials and contradicted by flight data, highlighting the complexities of attributing electronic interference in conflict-adjacent regions.
On Sunday, a plane chartered by the European Commission carrying von der Leyen on a tour of what she termed “front-line states” in Europe—countries particularly exposed to Russian influence or aggression—reportedly experienced a loss of GPS signals while approaching Plovdiv airport in Bulgaria. According to a Financial Times correspondent aboard the flight, the aircraft circled for approximately an hour before the pilot resorted to using traditional paper maps to execute a safe landing. The initial reaction from both Brussels and Sofia was swift and severe, with officials characterizing the event as “blatant interference” and implicitly pointing the finger at Russia, which has a documented history of GPS jamming and spoofing activities, especially in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea region since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
However, by Monday, flight-tracking service Flightradar24 revealed that its data indicated the GPS signal was never actually lost during the approach to Plovdiv. The service noted that the landing was delayed by only nine minutes, not an hour, and that public flight data showed the same aircraft had, in fact, experienced GPS disruptions the previous day over the Baltic Sea—a known hotspot for Russian electronic warfare operations—but not during the Bulgarian leg of the journey. This discrepancy raised questions about the initial reporting and the political motivations behind the rapid attribution to Moscow.
By Tuesday, Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov significantly tempered the rhetoric, describing the incident as a routine technical glitch linked to the broader electronic fallout from the war in Ukraine rather than a targeted hybrid or cyber threat. Zhelyazkov stated, “There is no need to investigate the situation because these disturbances are neither hybrid nor cyber threats,” effectively dismissing the need for a formal probe and aligning with observations that GPS disruptions have become increasingly common in Eastern Europe due to military electronic countermeasures, often without specific malicious intent toward civilian flights.