Von der Leyen’s plane circled Plovdiv for 90 minutes, the European Commission said

The aircraft, carrying Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to Bulgaria on Sunday, circled Plovdiv airport for an hour and a half before landing, said Paula Pinheiro, head of the Commission’s press service, who was also on board.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, Pinheiro said, incidents of disruption to global navigation satellite systems have sharply increased in the EU, particularly near conflict zones such as the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. She added that the EU would deploy tools to address the problem.

Earlier on Monday, Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov said there would be no investigation into the GPS disruption. “When GPS signals are disturbed, navigation is carried out using instruments, the so-called conventional method. These disturbances were neither hybrid nor cyber threats, so there was no need for an investigation,” he said.

Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that a suspected Russian cyberattack targeting the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, had disabled the GPS navigation system at a Bulgarian airport, forcing the president’s plane to land using paper maps.