Italy considers hiding state flight paths after jamming of von der Leyen plane

Rome: Italy is considering keeping state flights secret after the satellite signal of the aircraft carrying the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, was allegedly jammed by Russia, Italian defence ministry sources said.

Von der Leyen, a fierce critic of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and Moscow’s war in Ukraine, was flying to Bulgaria on Sunday when her charter plane lost satellite navigation aids, delaying its arrival in Plovdiv, and reportedly forcing it to circle an airport for an hour.

After the incident, EU member states are debating how to make leaders’ flights more secure, as GPS jamming and “spoofing”, an electronic warfare tactic that causes incorrect navigation information to be displayed, have increased since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and escalated even more sharply in the past year.

Defence officials said Rome was weighing plans to classify state flights, minimise the information published on the website of the prime minister’s office and prevent specialised tracking sites from making aircraft paths visible. Italy’s defence minister, Guido Crosetto, first floated this proposal several months ago when interference with satellite navigation started becoming increasingly common in airspace near Russia.

In August, Latvia’s electronic communications office said it had identified at least three jamming hotspots along borders with Russia. In April 2024, a Finnish airline temporarily suspended flights to the Estonian city of Tartu after jamming, while in March that year a plane carrying the British defence secretary had its satellite signal jammed as it flew near Russian territory.

A 2011 decree requires that information on Italian ministers’ movements, particularly flights, be published on the government website. Although the government would still be obliged to secure diplomatic clearance to fly over another country’s airspace, sources told the Guardian that Italy, “while respecting that protocol … could soon decide not to make such flights public”.

In February, the Italian prime minister’s plane was removed from Flightradar, one of the most widely used apps to provide real-time data on aircraft movements, but it remains visible on equivalent sites. For security reasons, officials are now considering “shielding flights carrying the prime minister and cabinet ministers from all such platforms”, sources said.

Media has plotted almost 80 incidents on a map, tracking a campaign of disruption across Europe blamed on Russia – which the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service described as staggeringly reckless.

Russia has denied it was behind the failure of the navigation system on von der Leyen’s flight. “Your information is incorrect,” the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Monday.

On Tuesday, Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, said he was taking the jamming of GPS signals “very seriously”. He said the alliance was working “day and night” to prevent jamming and ensure “they will not do it again”.