The problem with GPS/navigation in Moscow
A casualty of the current military conflict?
As I’ve mentioned, we recently made a trip to Moscow. I learned beforehand that an American clergyman whom I know well would be serving in a church there that I had not visited for almost 30 years. So we formulated a plan to visit that church, St. Cathernie’s, while in Moscow.
As it turned out, on our drive down, there had been a brief discussion in the car among our traveling companions that I had failed to comprehend. The topic of the conversation would turn out to be crucial as we made our way to the church.
There was no problem getting directions via Yandex maps to the general vicinity of the church. It showed us which subway lines we would need to take to get from the area where we had stayed the previous night to a subway stop near the church. The walk from the subway stop to the church should have taken about 15 minutes according to the directions.
As soon as we got out of the subway station onto the street, I began consulting the smartphone map to determine in which direction we should walk. This is when the trouble started. At first the map showed correctly our current location near the October subway station. But while studying the map to determine in which direction we should need to walk from there, suddenly the map jumped to a spot in the middle of a park about a kilometer west of where we were standing, showing that as our current location. Further, the current location kept jumping back and forth like that as I was studying the map, trying to determine in which direction we needed to start walking.
I decided at one point that we should cross the street, since I was getting the impression that was the direction in which we needed to go. So we crossed the street through a nearby underground passage (it was a busy street without crosswalks above ground) and began walking. While continuing to study the shifting map while walking it became clear that we should not have crossed the street after all. So we walked back to the passage and proceeded back to where we had started.
We then decided to walk down another, perpendicular street. Walking along that street, I again decided that we needed to cross it at another underground passage about a block away. It was then that my wife informed me about the conversation in the car that I had missed. The gist of that brief interchange was that someone had mentioned that cab/uber drivers that were from areas outside Moscow and so did not know the city well had needed to leave the city because their navigation systems had stopped working: this also seemed to explain the nature of our current difficulties walking to the nearby church.
As it turns out, at a certain point, the Russian authorities had started jamming GPS (or GLONASS, the name for the Russian global positioning satellite system) in Moscow so as to foil any potential drone or missile strikes on the capital. Having emerged from the underground passage above ground again, it once more became evident that that, again, we had not needed to cross the street. Once more we crossed back over.
In summary, because of all the disorientation caused by the jamming of satellite positioning signals, we decided to just rely on reading the map and not to attempt to follow the directions. So what should have been a 15-minute walk ended up taking us more like 45 minutes to an hour. We weren’t late for the main church service, but we did miss the earlier parts I’d planned to attend also. In this way, smartphone navigation can become a casualty of war.