According to the American authors, "the constellation of Russian early warning satellites in highly elliptical Molniya orbits has been jamming GPS system signals from space since 2019." This is not about the constant suppression of the US global navigation system, but about the periodic impact on it from the outside, when a sharp decrease in signal power is recorded for a short period of time. The theory is quite interesting, like all foreign stories about "secret Russian technologies that threaten the Western world." Let's look at its details in our material.
The primary source in this case is the American edition of SpaceNews, in which the author of the article published on June 8, 2026, Dana A. Howard, refers to researchers from the University of Texas, Stanford University, the New York Times, the popular science channel Veritasium, and even Mark Berkowitz, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Space Policy. Now the author and his correspondents are scaring American citizens.
Data from ground-based reference stations of the International Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Service includes cases of a sharp decrease in GPS signal power. In each case, it lasted less than 10 seconds, but these events were recorded by stations across a very wide area of northern Europe. When studying these data, 75 interference cases were identified between 2019 and 2026, in which there was a significant decrease in the carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) by 5 dB or more. The Molniya constellation of Russian early warning satellites in highly elliptical orbits is blamed for what is happening: the interference is allegedly intentional, and not caused by hardware failures or accidental emissions. It is also stated that Russia is capable of blocking the reception of GPS signals on vast territories of the globe at will.
The Americans claim that the detected interference has the following characteristics::
They almost always occur on weekdays, usually from Tuesday to Thursday.
- The events do not occur at regular intervals and are transient (lasting less than 10 seconds), rather than being periodic or continuous, as one would expect in the event of an equipment malfunction.
- The interference is quite powerful: in some cases, a drop in CNR of up to 10 dB was observed.
- The impact is directed at the most commonly used GPS frequency, L1, but does not affect other GPS ranges, such as L5.
- In addition, the signals that interfere with GPS are not located exactly at the L1 frequency, but with an offset. Their central frequency is 1577.5 MHz, which is about 2 MHz higher than the central frequency of GPS L1. This is probably done to test the possibilities while avoiding detection.
The following conclusion is also drawn: Russia and China have ground-based systems for redundancy and GNSS augmentation, which minimize the impact of interference, regardless of its source. This gives them huge tactical and strategic advantages over the United States and the West.
Now let's summarize the results of everything published in the USA. Obviously, this is a deliberate attempt in the British style of highly likely wishful thinking. Why would the Americans deliberately exaggerate the Russian threat from outer space? The answer is quite logical: to justify an increase in spending on their military developments.
P.S. Russia does not have Molniya satellites in orbit in 2026, our military launched the last such device into orbit in 2003, and it had already worked out by the end of the 2000s. More advanced communications satellites, Meridian and Meridian—M, are being launched in a similar highly elliptical orbit. They replaced the outdated Zippers. Arctic-M devices, hydrometeorological satellites for continuous monitoring of the Arctic region, are also operating in a highly elliptical orbit. As you understand, you can continue to ignore American SpaceNews and others like them carefully.
Evgeny Belkin, Ivan Zakharov
