NATO drills not behind Europe radar jammings: Official

“Our assessment is that NATO did not cause any interference with civilian air traffic control frequencies,” said a NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) military officer, whose name was not mentioned in the reports.
 
The comments came after dozens of aircraft briefly disappeared from radars in Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia on two occasions earlier this month.
 
The Slovak state Air Traffic Services Company said last week that the planes’ disappearance from radar screens on June 5 and 10 was linked to a military exercise whose objective was “the interruption of radio communication frequencies.”
 
According to Austrian media, NATO was behind the radar interference.
 
The NATO military officer said that the alliance carried out some training that involved “localized and low-power jamming” in the skies over Hungary during exercises on June 2-6 and that it is currently conducting similar training in southern Italy from June 9-20. However, the officer said, no jamming was conducted on June 5.
 
In addition, the NATO military officer rejected suspicions that surveillance aircraft, flying regularly over Europe to monitor Russian activities near Ukraine, could have caused the radar interference, saying AWACS jets do not have jamming capabilities.
 
NATO has staged a number of exercises in Eastern Europe amid the crisis in Ukraine, with the latest one launched on June 9 in the Baltic country of Latvia.
 
The exercises follow military drills held in neighboring Estonia last month with a record-breaking 6,000 troops from NATO-allied countries, including the UK, the US, Latvia, and Lithuania.