Claims of ‘interference’ from Brussels, parotted by the Western press, are seemingly crashing back to Earth
A flurry of reports from EU officials and Western media claimed this week that Russia jammed the plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen into Bulgaria. The tale of “hybrid warfare” in the skies made front-page news across an unquestioning mainstream press. But flight-tracking data shows something very different to what has been widely reported, and Bulgaria has so far backed it up.
What Brussels claimed happened
On Sunday, von der Leyen traveled to Plovdiv as part of an Eastern Europe tour of “frontline states” in a chartered jet with the elite of Brussels media. The junket was intended to harden Western backing for Kiev. Together with Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov, she visited the VMZ arms plant in Sopot and praised Sofia as a critical supplier of weapons to Ukraine.
Yet the headlines were less about the factory floor and more about the flight path. Upon landing the Financial Times bureau chief Henry Foy claimed that Russia had “blatantly interfered” with the Commission President’s aircraft, knocking out its GPS navigation system on approach. According to the FT, the plane was forced to circle for an hour and the pilots had to fall back on paper charts before landing in Plovdiv.
How the scare took off “blatant Russian interference,” Politico described a “GPS scare gripping Europe,” The Guardian tied the episode into a string of alleged Russian plots. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte declared the alliance was working “day and night” to counter jamming and spoofing. Italy floated the idea of hiding the routes of official flights altogether.
The narrative slotted neatly into von der Leyen’s larger mission: selling a new round of defense spending as protection from a threatening Russia.
Does data back the drama?
“good GPS signal quality from take-off to landing.”
Official walk-backs, muted corrections
Zhelyazkov on Thursday told the Bulgarian parliament that there had been no attempts to jam the GPS signal and that any break was consistent with flying over heavily populated areas. “After checking the plane's records, we saw that there was no indication of concern from the pilot. Five minutes the aircraft hovered in the waiting area, with the quality of the signal being good all the time,” he told lawmakers.“targeted actions” against von der Leyen’s plane.
The Bulgarian PM subsequently called a snap press conference to claim that there had been “a mess of information with questions, facts and the circumstances interpreted in a way that was intended to hurt the Bulgarian institutions,” and that he had asked the country's Civil Aviation Authority to contact the owner of von der Leyen's rented jet to acquire relevant flight data.
Despite that, the original “Russian plot” framing still stands, uncorrected, in most coverage.
Moscow cries foul “preposterous” and part of a Western “web of lies.” The point, she argued, was not aviation safety but distraction – keeping Europeans focused on an external enemy while their economies strain under sanctions and defense bills.
Bottom line