How Putin plans to target the UK by disrupting our daily lives

The West has long been concerned about a full-scale war between Nato and Russia. Vladimir Putin has often threatened to respond aggressively if provoked. But what about the low-level campaign of harassment and interference long underway?

Causing a nuisance can be a powerful weapon. Tuesday’s statement by Anne Keast-Butler, director of the UK’s electronic intelligence service GCHQ, that Russia is “relentlessly” targeting British and European critical infrastructure as part of its hybrid operations, must have come as no surprise to Defence Secretary John Healey.

Last week, Healey’s plane was subjected to GPS jamming while flying back from Estonia. His Dassault 900LX Falcon was flying back from Tartu when it was subjected to jamming that disrupted its GPS location system and left the passengers unable to connect their phones and laptops to the internet.

The Falcon, a civilian aircraft flown by the RAF, had not been fitted with special protective systems. This generated much furore about it being “defenceless”, with Tory MP Ben Obese-Jecty writing on social media that it was “absurd that the Defence Secretary is flying close to Russian airspace in an aircraft incapable of defending itself”.

At a time when the defence budget is already well beyond the point of overstretch, the cost-effectiveness of the estimated £200m it would cost to provide additional protection to the UK’s two jets of this kind is open to debate

But this is not the first such incident: much the same happened to Healey’s predecessor, Grant Shapps, when a plane he was on flew close to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad in 2024. RAF pilots operating in the area are used to such interference, and shift to unjammable inertial navigation systems to determine their exact position.

The jamming is a side effect of Russia’s anti-drone defences, but it is also an important element to Putin’s overall “death by a thousand papercuts” campaign of sabotage and harassment within Europe. The goal is to undermine collective unity and the will to continue to support Ukraine’s military.

There is no sense that either of the British planes was specifically targeted. Russia routinely jams signals all along its western border. In particular, it relies on the so-called “Baltic Beast”, the 14Ts227 Tobol electronic warfare complex sited in Kaliningrad, which is sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland.

Russia has mobile electronic warfare systems, like the Pole-21, Zhitel and Krasukha, but the fixed Tobol stations are much more powerful and are able to suppress and disrupt GPS and other satellite signals, including Starlink, up to 280 miles away.

Moscow residents have long been accustomed to GPS spoofing aimed at diverting incoming drones: someone in Red Square checking the map on their phone might see themselves instead at Vnukovo airport, southwest of the city, or even hundreds of miles away in Crimea.

Pilots operating around the Baltic region and near Russia’s border have also become used to periodic service interruptions that also sometimes affect maritime navigation. Lithuania’s Communications Regulatory Authority has noted that pilots are now filing more than a hundred reports of GPS jamming a month.

Ultimately, none of these attacks seem to have caused serious problems, let alone any loss of life. So, what is the point of maintaining this Russian campaign of electronic harassment?

In part, it is a by-product of Russia’s defensive anti-drone jamming, especially now that Ukraine is launching long-range strikes against oil refineries and loading ports in the Baltic region.

However, it is also part of Russia’s wider campaign of disruption, sabotage and irritation being waged against Europe. A diverted airliner, a burnt-down shopping mall, a deniable cyber attack – none of these alone are especially significant on a geopolitical scale, but combined they create a worrying picture.

The hope is that an accumulation of small-scale irritants and costs may eventually begin to make Europeans question their governments’ policies over Ukraine. It may sound implausible, but it is not impossible.

You have a difficult commute home because someone sabotaged a signals relay. You want to unwind with the latest episode of the series you’re binging but a cyber attack is blocking the streaming service. At that moment your phone pings with a warning from your bank that you need to change all your passwords because of a hack.

You may not connect this to Russia, but if your conviction grows that nothing works, that everyone in charge is useless and that money ought to be spent fixing things at home rather than heading abroad, then that’s just as good for the Kremlin.

It’s also a campaign that has little risk for Putin, and much upside if it sows divisions among his adversaries.

One might feel that Healey had it easy, his flight was in the hands of well-trained RAF pilots and his systems presumably well-protected. Putin wouldn’t have wanted to make it too uncomfortable for him. For the rest of us, we face an indefinite future of low-level, often small-scale nuisances and disruptions.

And while there are things that can be done to protect our infrastructure, for the most part we just need to try to keep calm and carry on.