The Daily Populous Tuesday September 2nd, 2025 night edition
Authored by nbcnews.com and submitted by CupidStunt13

A plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was hit by radar jamming over Bulgaria in a suspected Russian operation, a spokesperson said Monday.

The plane landed safely in Plovdiv airport and von der Leyen will continue her planned tour of the European Union’s nations bordering Russia and Belarus, said the commission’s spokesperson Arianna Podestà.

“We can indeed confirm that there was GPS jamming,” said Podestà. “We have received information from the Bulgarian authority that they suspect that this was due to blatant interference by Russia.”

Von der Leyen, a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow’s war in Ukraine, is on a four-day tour of the E.U. nations bordering Russia and its ally Belarus.

“This incident actually underlines the urgency of the mission that the president is carrying out in the front-line member states,” Podestà said.

She said that von der Leyen has seen “firsthand the everyday challenges of threats coming from Russia and its proxies.”

“And, of course, the E.U. will continue to invest into defense spending and in Europe’s readiness even more after this incident,” she said.

Bulgaria issued a statement saying that “the satellite signal used for the aircraft’s GPS navigation was disrupted. As the aircraft approached Plovdiv Airport, the GPS signal was lost.”

ninjazeus on September 1st, 2025 at 15:06 UTC »

This is a really common issue in the whole area near Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Israel, etc. You can tell what direction jamming comes and determine how far away it is if you have the right tech.

Planes can navigate easily with no GPS, and there are multiple other GNSS constellations and signal bands that aren’t going to be affected by jamming unless the jammer is quite advanced. They’ve also probably got an anti-jam antenna system on the plane, so it’s possible that they DID lose GPS (or GNSS if that’s what they mean), but it wasn’t long enough to actually cause any real problems.

Since they know it’s coming from Russia, this is extremely petty behavior by the Russians since they’d know it’ll pretty much do nothing to the plane.

Edit: added some more detail to the second paragraph

Blindman081 on September 1st, 2025 at 12:59 UTC »

That whole region has issues with gps jamming

CupidStunt13 on September 1st, 2025 at 12:36 UTC »

> A plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was hit by radar jamming over Bulgaria in a suspected Russian operation, a spokesperson said Monday.

> The plane landed safely in Plovdiv airport and von der Leyen will continue her planned tour of the European Union’s nations bordering Russia and Belarus, said the commission’s spokesperson Arianna Podestà.

> “We can indeed confirm that there was GPS jamming,” said Podestà. “We have received information from the Bulgarian authority that they suspect that this was due to blatant interference by Russia.”

> Von der Leyen, a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow’s war in Ukraine, is on a four-day tour of the E.U. nations bordering Russia and its ally Belarus.

Curious what the reasoning would be for the Russians pulling this stunt. Did they really want to cause trouble for the flight, or just be dickheads and remind von der Leyen they're around?