There is reason why the name of the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen is often mangled into von der Lying.
She is notoriously negligent with facts. Here she is caught outright lying to spread fake anti-Russian propaganda.
When I read the headline below, first published by the Financial Times, I immediately thought that something was very wrong with it.
Ursula von der Leyen’s plane hit by suspected Russian GPS interference (archived) – FT, Sep 1 2025
A suspected Russian interference attack targeting Ursula von der Leyen disabled GPS navigation services at a Bulgarian airport and forced the European Commission president’s plane to land using paper maps.
A jet carrying von der Leyen to Plovdiv on Sunday afternoon was deprived of electronic navigational aids while on approach to the city’s airport, in what three officials briefed on the incident said was being treated as a Russian interference operation.
GPS navigation is based on receiving radio signals from satellites. There is no way to selectively block or disturb these for just a single receiver. If someone would have manipulated GPS in that area it would effected every GPS receiver in the same geography. But I could not find any reports from Bulgaria that taxi drivers or other people using GPS navigation had any trouble with it. There was not a single tweet on X complaining about it.
“The whole airport area GPS went dark,” said one of the officials. After circling the airport for an hour, the plane’s pilot took the decision to land the plane manually using analogue maps, they added. “It was undeniable interference.”
The Bulgarian Air Traffic Services Authority confirmed the incident in a statement to the Financial Times. “Since February 2022, there has been a notable increase in [GPS] jamming and recently spoofing occurrences,” it said. “These interferences disrupt the accurate reception of [GPS] signals, leading to various operational challenges for aircraft and ground systems.”
The three anonymous "officials" the FT is quoting (which likely include von der Leyen) are lying. The statement by the Bulgarian Air Traffic Services Authority is just a general one. It does not say anything about the alleged incident.
GPS failure does not mean that one has to use "paper maps". (There are by the way no longer any "paper maps" on professional airliners. Maps are stored digitally.) Modern planes do not depend on GPS. They mainly use their Inertial Reference System. They can also navigate by following ground radar signals. Airports for regular landing of jets have Instrument Landing Systems installed. Short range radio signals from the ground will guide the plane onto the runway. There is no need to wait "for an hour".
As Simple Flying summarizes:
- The IRS, or Inertial Reference System, is the main navigational system in aircraft, independent of outside signals or input.
- GPS is crucial for navigation in modern aircraft, with other aids like VOR and NDB used for backup.
- Aircraft navigational systems are highly independent, with [Flight Management Systems] processing multiple positional data for precise navigation.
The claims of "paper maps" and "an hour" on hold, just like the whole story, did not make any sense to me.
It has now been confirmed that the story is wrong. It is a lie, made up out of whole cloth.
Flightradar24 is ..:
.. a Swedish Internet-based service that shows real-time aircraft flight tracking information on a map. It includes flight tracking information, origins and destinations, flight numbers, aircraft types, positions, altitudes, headings and speeds. It can also show time-lapse replays of previous tracks and historical flight data by airline, aircraft, aircraft type, area, or airport. It aggregates data from multiple sources, but, outside of the United States, mostly from crowdsourced information gathered by volunteers with ADS-B receivers and from satellite-based ADS-B receivers.
Here is what Flightradar was seeing at that time:
Flightradar24 @flightradar24 – 17:16 UTC · Sep 1, 2025
We are seeing media reports of GPS interference affecting the plane carrying Ursula von der Leyen to Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Some reports claim that the aircraft was in a holding pattern for 1 hour.
This is what we can deduce from our data.
* The flight was scheduled to take 1 hour and 48 minutes. It took 1 hour and 57 minutes.
* The aircraft's transponder reported good GPS signal quality from take-off to landing.
bigger
Flightradar24 @flightradar24 – 17:50 UTC · Sep 1, 2025
The transponder signal transmitted by the aircraft contains a NIC value.
The NIC value encodes the quality and consistency of navigational data received by the aircraft.
Flightradar24 is using these NIC values to create the GPS jamming map at https://flightradar24.com/data/gps-jammingThe flight with Ursula von der Leyen on board transmitted a good NIC value from take-off to landing.
Āris Cēders @arisceders – 1:14 UTC · Sep 2, 2025
Still, they radioed about the “GPS issue” and requested ILS approach which is significantly less convenient in this particular case.
Sound file attached
Flightradar24 @flightradar24 –
"Issue with GPS" can be any technical issue unrelated to GPS jamming. The aircraft was reporting a perfect signal. For sure they were not holding for 1h so the whole story just doesn't make any sense.
The aim of the whole story, which is BASED ON LIES, is to denounce Russia.
The FT piece continues:
The European Commission later confirmed the incident. “There was GPS jamming but the plane landed safely in Bulgaria,” a spokesperson said.
“We have received info from the Bulgarian authorities that they suspect that this was due to blatant interference by Russia.
“We are of course aware and used to the threats and intimidation that are a regular component of Russia’s hostile behaviour,” the spokesperson added.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the FT that “your information is incorrect”.
Other aircraft in the area appear to have been able to ascertain and report their positions without issue, according to online flight trackers, giving weight to the suspicion that the jamming of von der Leyen’s aircraft was a narrowly focused effort.
Again – there is no way to selectively disturb the receiving of GPS signals for a single airplane. Any such disturbance would have effected everyone in the area.
So-called GPS jamming and spoofing, which distorts or prevents access to the satellite-based navigation system, was traditionally deployed by military and intelligence services to defend sensitive sites but has increasingly been used by countries such as Russia as a means of disrupting civilian life.
EU governments have warned that rising GPS jamming blamed on Russia risks causing an air disaster by essentially blinding commercial aircraft mid-journey.
Russia has been using GPS jamming in Kaliningrad, St.Peterburg, Moscow and elsewhere to prevent Ukrainian drones from navigating by GPS to their targets. There were many complains by taxi drivers and others in those cities when their navigation systems were failing.
Russia did not and does not do this to "disrupt civilian life". It is a protective measure necessitated by being under fire from GPS guided NATO drones. It is unfortunately not a selective measure.
Von der Lying is a liar. A propagandist who wants to push Europe into further hostilities against Russia:
Von der Leyen was flying from Warsaw to the central Bulgarian city of Plovdiv to meet the country’s prime minister, Rosen Zhelyazkov, and tour an ammunition factory when the incident took place.
She was on a tour of the EU’s frontline states to discuss efforts to improve the bloc’s defence readiness in response to Russia’s war against Ukraine.
“[Russian president Vladimir] Putin has not changed, and he will not change,” von der Leyen told reporters while on the ground in Bulgaria on Sunday. “He is a predator. He can only be kept in check through strong deterrence.”
I'll let you judge who is predating on whom with this.