Finnish official believes Kaliningrad should be cut off from Russia

Mika Aaltola, a Finnish politician and candidate for the European Parliament from the National Coalition party, proposed cutting Russia from Kaliningrad. In his opinion, the Russian city interferes with the activities of European airlines.

"If Russia interferes with air travel, why not ban or tighten Russian access to Kaliningrad?" Mika Aaltola wrote on social media.

Aaltola said that interference in the GPS satellite navigation system comes from Russia's Kaliningrad enclave. The Baltic countries also accused Russia of interfering with aircraft navigation.

Press secretary of the Kaliningrad Governor Dmitry Lyskov said in response to Aaltola's post that statements from European politicians about Kaliningrad were getting increasingly absurd. Russian aircraft do not experience problems with navigation, despite the fact that both domestic and European airlines use the same GPS modules, he said.

The Financial Times wrote with reference to foreign ministers of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia that the Baltic countries suspected Russia of suppressing GPS signals to interfere with aircraft navigation. Two Finnish aircraft were forced to return to their departure airports due to problems with navigation signals.

In early April, the head of the Swedish Navy, Ewa Skoog Haslum, accused Russia of GPS interference in the Baltic Sea and urged NATO to intervene even though she did not provide any evidence to support her claim.

On April 27, a Finnair passenger plane aborted landing in Tartu, Estonia, due to GPS interference. According to Western media thousands of flights have encountered problems with satellite navigation in the Baltic Sea area over the past eight months. Most cases were reported in regions of Eastern Europe that border Russia.

Experts believe that GPS signals can be jammed using relatively cheap equipment. No country has officially acknowledged its involvement in the jamming. An official interviewed by the FT said that Russia was causing navigation problems using equipment based in Kaliningrad. Moscow is thus allegedly trying to protect the region from possible Ukrainian drone attacks, the unnamed official said.