November 14, 2025: Recently enacted harsher sanctions against Russian oil exports. This includes seizing tankers covertly carrying Russian oil. This year Norway noticed a number of sanctioned oil tankers moving past northern Norway towards the northwestern Russian ports on Kola Bay to take on cargoes of Russian oil. Russia has a growing network of Russian arctic oil fields off its northern coast and the oil is moved by special ice resistant oil tankers to Kola Bay where the oil is transferred to nondescript tankers for delivery to distant customers. These tankers are often identified as sanctioned vessels. The Russians try to change the visual and electronic appearance of these tankers by modifying the mandatory transponders or installing new ones. Russia can’t afford to lose oil export incomes. The new sanctions are seeking to halt up to $50 billion worth of Russian oil exports a year.

Norway is an enthusiastic enforcer of these sanctions because it has a growing list of complaints about Russian misbehavior. Over the last two years Norway has been subject to constant Russian GPS jamming. This has been happening, on and off, since 2018. The jamming increased after Russia invaded Ukraine and this year jamming takes place daily. Russia justifies the jamming to prevent Ukraine from using armed drones to attack Russian naval and air bases.

In 2018 Finland and Norway openly complained about Russia deliberately jamming GPS signals in northern Finland and Norway. The jamming was done from a Russian military base in the Kola Peninsula on the Barents Sea. The area is where Norway and Russia share a small border. The jamming took place in late 2018 as NATO held its largest training exercise since the Cold War ended in 1991. Russia denied any responsibility even though they are known to possess long-range jammers, for GPS and other signals. Norway said they had tracked the jammer to a specific location but when Russia refused to admit any involvement, Norway refused to explain how they tracked the signal because that would provide Russia with information on Norwegian electronic warfare/EW equipment that might be useful to them.

What was curious about this incident was that it had no impact on the NATO military exercises and even commercial airliners operating in the area which had backup Inertial Navigation Systems/INS in case GPS signals were not working properly. The potential victims were civilians with smaller aircraft or on the ground who depend on commercial navigation gear using GPS. Then again, that may have been the point because Russian firms have long been producing a wide variety of GPS jammers that are generally ineffective against military GPS users but would be useful for criminals, terrorists or anyone involved in irregular warfare as Russia did in Ukraine between 2014 and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. As for the damage to diplomatic relations with Norway and Finland, these two nations need no reminders of what a bad neighbor Russia is and historically has been.