Moscow air defences jam taxi apps and runners’ smartwatches

As well as irritating joggers, Russian GPS jamming is now also annoying taxi drivers and their passengers. Photo / Supplied

Frustrated joggers in Moscow have complained that GPS jamming equipment meant to protect the city from drone attacks has scrambled their smartwatches.

Runners in the Moscow half-marathon on May 14 reported that pace and distance trackers failed as they ran past the Kremlin, ruining aspirations to beat personal best times.

“It’s a cool route and fast, all along the Moskva River embankment,” said Anton Alekseev on the VK social media page of the Gazprom Triathlon Team.

“But glitches around satellite navigation completely suppressed what you could achieve. You had to focus on old-school pacing using distance markers along the route and a stopwatch.”

Denis Chernyshov, his teammate, agreed and complained that his Garmin smartwatch had failed and botched his run.

“GPS didn’t work in the city centre,” he said. “Garmin did not show my real pace and told me that I’d run not 21.1km (13.1 miles) but 38km.”

Russian newspapers and Telegram channels have reported that the security services have jammed GPS signals around the Kremin since two drones hit it on May 3.

The Moscow-based Kommersant newspaper quoted a security service source confirming that “interceptors” were being used to “suppress signals transmitted from satellites” in the city centre.

The Kremlin spent billions developing its own Global Navigation Satellite System (Glonass) but it has not replaced the US-owned GPS in civilian technology, such as smartwatches and cab-hailing apps.

And as well as irritating joggers, Russian GPS jamming is now also annoying taxi drivers and their passengers.

Yandex, a Russia-based online search engine that also runs a cab-hailing business, said apps were now failing, forcing taxi drivers and passengers to ring each other to organise successful pick-ups.

“Due to these failures, some taxi users may be incorrectly showing their pick-up point,” it said in a statement reported by Russian news agencies this week.

A Moscow taxi driver called Anatoly told the Moscow Region Today website that his earnings had halved in the past couple of weeks because of cancelled rides.

“Locals who know Moscow may be able to get in touch but visitors get bored and wander off,” he said.