There’s a map of aircraft reports for Nov. 3 going around on social media right now because it shows satellite navigation degraded along nearly the whole of NATO’s eastern border.

From Kaliningrad through Lithuania, eastern Poland, Romania and Bulgaria to the western Black Sea, signals were affected. ItaMilRadar built it from AirNav Radar data and Defence Blog published it as if an imminent threat indicator. The map does, in fact, record where aircraft lost their accuracy. The jammer locations and direction, however, are not present. Nonetheless, this map generated claims that it was from Russia after they stood up a 1,500 km electronic wall on the border. The Midgard OSINT Review checked that claim against the data and reported a surge on a strike night. In other words, stray drones are the actual risk, while device details remain unknown.

The attribution fog of war is the actual story here, perhaps ironically for a jamming night.

Russian electronic warfare at Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, Smolensk and Rostov jams to push swarms of Ukrainian drones off course. Flank states also run counter-drone jamming to bring down strays. An aircraft receiver in that region reports the same degraded signal either way, with no bearing to the source, so one map is everything at once. An aircraft sees a single problem, which means it shouldn’t attempt to point in either direction without additional work.

Defense right now adds to the fog as a side effect, which means the case stays open against an adversary who considers an open case to be a win.

When the poof is the proof, attribution costs suffer from inflation.