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Russians Seek Answers To Central Moscow GPS Anomaly (yahoo.com)
stevegee58 writes: Russians have been noticing that their GPS doesn't work in Moscow near the Kremlin. Everyone from taxi drivers to Pokemon Go players suddenly notice that they're transported 18 miles away at the airport when they near the Kremlin. While this may be an annoyance to the public it seems like a reasonable countermeasure to potential terrorist threats. Is it only a matter of time before other vulnerable sites such as the White House or the Capitol in Washington start doing the same? "A programmer for Russian internet firm Yandex, Grigory Bakunov, said Thursday his research showed a system for blocking GPS was located inside the Kremlin, the heavily guarded official residence of Russian President Vladimir Putin," reports Yahoo. "The first anomaly was recorded in June, according to Russian media reports, which have also suggested that the GPS interference comes and goes in a pattern. Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday he did not know why the malfunction was occurring and admitted experiencing the problem himself when driving recently. Peskov redirected questions to Russia's Federal Guards Service, which is responsible for protecting the Kremlin and senior Russian officials."
GPS coverage can't be disabled or modified by the GPS satellites selectively over such a small area as the Kremlin. The satellites are essentially just sending the time and their location continuously and their antennas aren't very directional. Anything they did that affected accuracy at the Kremlin would have to affect a wide surrounding area as well. Any localised effect as described has to be local jamming which almost certainly means official Russian involvement.
It is strange to see many posters think that GPS is an american something. GPS is a shorthand for the generic term "Global Positioning System".
The american implementation is called NAVSTAR,
The soviet (later russian) implementation is called Glonass,
The European Union has Galileo and
The chinese system is called COMPASS
(but most call it Bei-dou, lit. art of wayfinding, in order not to confuse it with "Compass Call" which is an american military satellite jamming aircraft).
All of these are Global Positioning Systems, although there were a few years after the fall of USSR, when only the american system had truly global reach, due to russians' lack of funds to replace ailing satellites.