A plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been hit by radar jamming over Bulgaria in a suspected Russian operation, an EU spokesperson says.<\/p>\n
The Financial Times first reported that the GPS navigation system of the plane was disabled externally, forcing a landing at the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv using paper maps.<\/p>\n
The newspaper cited three officials familiar with the incident that happened on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Reuters could not immediately verify the report.<\/p>\n
EU Commission spokesperson Arianna Podest\u00e0 said the GPS system of the plane to Bulgaria was jammed.<\/p>\n
Jamming refers to a GPS receiver being targeted with stronger, unknown radio signals, which “degrades” its functionalities, according to live air traffic website FlightRadar24.<\/p>\n
It can, however, happen both accidentally or due to a deliberate attempt by illegal external devices.<\/p>\n
“We can indeed confirm that there was GPS jamming,” Ms Podest\u00e0 said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We have received information from the Bulgarian authority that they suspect that this was due to blatant interference by Russia.”<\/p>\n
Jamming occurs day after Putin labelled ‘predator’<\/p>\n
Ms von der Leyen’s plane landed safely at the planned location and she will continue her tour of the EU’s nations bordering Russia and its ally Belarus, the Associated Press reported.<\/p>\n
The EU president is a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow’s war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Ms Podest\u00e0 said Ms von der Leyen had seen “firsthand the everyday challenges of threats coming from Russia and its proxies”.<\/p>\n
Visiting the town of Ozierany Male on the Polish-Belarusian border on Sunday, the EU president called her Russian counterpart a “predator” who needed to be “kept in check through strong deterrence”.<\/p>\n
“We have to keep the sense of urgency because we know that Putin has and will not change,” Ms von der Leyen said.<\/p>\n
Bulgaria issued a statement saying that “the satellite signal used for the aircraft’s GPS navigation was disrupted”.<\/p>\n
“As the aircraft approached Plovdiv Airport, the GPS signal was lost,” it said.<\/p>\n
ABC\/wires<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been hit by radar jamming over Bulgaria…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":110728,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[29021,7130,43,44,79305,79306,79308,41,39,42,40,2011,79307],"class_list":["post-110727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-european-commission","tag-gps","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-plane-landing","tag-plovdiv","tag-president-eu","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-von-der-leyen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110727\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}