Ground truth is what survives.

01 // THE CASE

The store at 30 Aviatsionnaya Street

Investigation: GeoSudoku · Written by: SSX360 · Bataysk, Rostov Oblast · Night of October 9–10, 2026

A 21-second video showed a damaged grocery store without any street signs, addresses, or recognizable landmarks. A neighboring roofline gave GeoSudoku a way to identify the location.

On the night of October 9–10, 2026, Ukrainian drones struck oil and rail targets across Rostov Oblast. By morning, the Russian Ministry of Defense said that 560 drones had been shot down nationwide between 20:00 and 08:00. Regional reporting put the Rostov Oblast count at more than 100 downed or suppressed. A railway bridge had been struck, two vessels had been damaged at Azov, and an oil-loading terminal was burning.^1,2,3

During the same period, a short video circulated through Russian Telegram channels. It appeared to show the separated booster of a surface-to-air missile lying near a grocery store checkout after falling through the roof.

Astra, citing eyewitness footage first posted by the Supernova+ channel, identified the object as the booster stage of a 9M335 Pantsir missile. Astra labeled that identification presumptive.⁴ Pantsir missiles discard their boosters shortly after launch, near the area being defended, which makes the account technically plausible. No official source confirmed the munition type.

Governor Yuri Slyusar gave a different account for Bataysk: a UAV had struck an unoccupied apartment building in a residential complex, and firefighters were responding to a blaze.⁵ Later reporting said a building housing a Magnit supermarket had been damaged, along with private homes and five cars. Those reports gave no address.³

GeoSudoku identified the chain as Magnit, Russia's largest food retailer by store count, by matching checkout decals visible at 00:16 with a brand-identity developer's vector sheets.⁶ The exterior pan at 00:02 supplied the architectural clue: a neighboring building with a distinctive stepped, asymmetric roofline.⁷

Yandex Maps listed 289 Magnit stores in Rostov-on-Don on the day of the search. GeoSudoku reports checking each location by hand against the roofline. None matched. Two stores warranted a closer look: 80/206 Sokolova Avenue and 147B 2nd Krasnodarskaya Street. Both had a multistory neighbor in roughly the right position, but neither had the stepped gable.

The search expanded to Bataysk, immediately south of Rostov-on-Don, adding 40 candidates. A store at 59/123V Engels Street was another near match, excluded on the same architectural feature.

One location remained: the Magnit at 30 Aviatsionnaya Street. Its neighbor at 29 Aviatsionnaya Street has the stepped, asymmetric gable seen in the video. The bearing of roughly 22.5° north-northeast from the apparent filming position also fits the footage. The resulting coordinates are 47.126036, 39.765669.⁷

According to the investigator's record, 328 of 329 candidates were excluded, leaving one consistent with the evidence. The counts reflect Yandex Maps listings as of October 11, 2026. A later search may return different totals as stores open, close, or are relisted.

Astra published the Aviatsionnaya address on the evening of October 10, one day before GeoSudoku's post.^4,7 GeoSudoku's contribution is the documented reconstruction: following the physical evidence independently produced the same address.

Air-defense debris harming civilians has been documented elsewhere in the war, and officials have repeatedly attributed damage to drone debris.^8,9 The Bataysk analysis supports the location finding. The identity of the munition remains indeterminate.

02 // METHOD

Verification as a discipline

Candidate search · Roofline comparison · Recorded exclusions

The roofline comparison supplied a match. Checking the other listed stores showed whether another location could explain the same footage.

GeoSudoku began with the listed Magnit locations and compared each against the same visible feature. Recording why candidates were excluded gives another analyst a way to review the search, including the near matches that required closer inspection.

The neighboring roofline was useful because it was independent of the store's signage, branding, and interior layout. The stepped gable and its position relative to the storefront could be compared with satellite imagery. The conclusion rests on that visual and spatial match at 29 Aviatsionnaya Street and the investigator's exclusion of 328 alternatives using the same test.

A specification, datasheet, official statement, or social-media post can provide a starting point for an investigation. Reproducibility requires a record that another analyst can follow: the candidates considered, the features compared, and the reasons for excluding each alternative. The same question applies when reviewing radio signals or embedded hardware: what can a reviewer check independently?

GeoSudoku is a small, pseudonymous Telegram channel. Its methodology post is public at t.me/geosudoku/187, although the web preview does not render it and readers need the Telegram client to view it. The elimination counts are the investigator's own. Readers can check the location against public geography and compare it with the independently published address; the full candidate list remains with the investigator.

03 // EVIDENCE LEDGER

What the case file records

Case: BATAYSK-30-AVIATSIONNAYA · Counts: investigator-reported · Sources snapshot: October 11, 2026

The ledger summarizes the candidate sets, comparison features, and exclusions reported by the investigator. It also records the source material, competing accounts, and custody of the working files.

04 // CONTEXT

GNSS interference in aviation

GNSS interference · Boeing · ICAO · IATA · OPSGROUP · Figures as published by each source

Navigation poses a related verification problem. A receiver can accept counterfeit signals and report a position that appears valid. Aircraft records and interference studies show how often navigation systems are being disrupted.

Boeing's GPS Event Monitor analyzes aircraft-recorded data. It logged a GPS event on 90,532 of 305,510 flight legs flown by 841 Boeing 777s and 45 Boeing 787s across 37 operators. The data covered periods from June 2024 to May 2025. Roughly 30 percent of monitored flights experienced an event, according to Boeing's September 2026 presentation to an ICAO radionavigation workshop.¹⁰

Ninety-two percent of affected flights recovered before landing. The highest reported rates by flight information region were Ankara at 77 percent, St. Petersburg at 71 percent, and Minsk at 69 percent.¹⁰ A later Boeing dataset covered more than 1.3 million monitor reports from over 1,000 aircraft between August 2025 and January 2026. About 31 percent of flights showed symptoms of GNSS interference.¹¹

A 2025 joint submission to ICAO by Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland recorded 122,607 flights by 365 airlines affected by GNSS interference between January and April 2025. In April, the average share of disrupted flights in the affected airspace reached 27.4 percent and exceeded 42 percent in some areas.¹²

The report located interference sources in four areas inside Russia: Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, Smolensk, and Rostov, the oblast that includes Bataysk.¹² In March 2025, the ITU Radio Regulations Board concluded that measurements placed the source of Baltic, Eastern European, and Northern European interference within Russian territory. On October 3, 2025, the 42nd ICAO Assembly condemned GNSS radio-frequency interference originating from Russia and North Korea, endorsing the Council's finding that the interference violated the Chicago Convention.^13,14

Spoofing broadcasts counterfeit signals intended to produce a false position or time solution. Jamming degrades or blocks legitimate signals. OPSGROUP estimated that spoofing affected about 300 flights a day in the first half of 2024, rising roughly fivefold to about 1,500 a day by September. SkAI Data Services counted more than 310,000 affected flights in 2024 through ADS-B analysis. That count is incomplete because the method detects only aircraft broadcasting a corrupted position.^15,16

IATA's Flight Data eXchange recorded approximately 580,000 GPS signal-loss events across roughly 18.4 million flights between August 2021 and June 2024. The rate rose from 28.1 events per 1,000 flights in 2021 to 50.8 in the first half of 2024. By December 2025, IATA reported 56 events per 1,000 flights for 2024 and projected 59 for 2025.^17,18 These datasets measure different symptoms over different periods. Each records substantial disruption; their figures should be read within those separate scopes.

05 // THE RECEIVER’S PROBLEM

Conflicting accounts at Plovdiv

Plovdiv · August 31, 2025 · Pokrova · Attribution

The flight carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen into Plovdiv became the subject of conflicting claims about GPS interference. Public statements, flight-tracking data, and ground measurements gave different accounts of the incident.

After the aircraft experienced GPS-related difficulties approaching Plovdiv on August 31, 2025, the European Commission said Bulgarian authorities suspected Russian interference. The Kremlin rejected that account.¹⁹ Flightradar24's data showed the transponder reporting good GPS signal-quality indicators from takeoff to landing and a delay of nine minutes. The data did not support reports of an hour spent circling.²⁰

Bulgaria's prime minister initially said there would be no investigation. He later told parliament that ground instruments had detected no jamming near Plovdiv and ordered an inquiry. The transport minister said the pilot had reported minor GPS issues without attributing them to Russia.^21,22 Those accounts leave questions about both the event and its cause. A receiver's calculated position alone cannot establish who interfered with its inputs or why.

Ukraine also uses spoofing defensively. Pokrova has been publicly described as a nationwide GNSS spoofing deployment intended to divert incoming Shahed drones. For the November 26, 2024 attack, Le Monde, citing a source close to Ukrainian military intelligence, reported that of 188 Shaheds launched, 76 were shot down and 95 were diverted by spoofed coordinates. The Ukrainian Air Force's statement used a broader category for those 95: lost from radar or downed by electronic warfare. The Air Force statement therefore does not establish that all 95 were diverted by spoofing.^23,24

The potential cost of losing GNSS service extends beyond aviation. A 2019 RTI International study estimated that a loss of GPS could cost the United States about $1 billion a day, with losses up to 50 percent higher during planting season. A co-author described "a billion dollars per day" as "the floor, not the ceiling."^25,26 A London Economics study published by the UK Space Agency in 2023 estimated the cost of a 24-hour British GNSS outage at £1.42 billion.²⁷

Attribution remains contested. Russia says its jamming defends against Ukrainian drones. In May 2024, a senior official at the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki suggested that Baltic interference could be spillover from Russian counter-drone operations. Baltic and Nordic governments, NATO, ICAO, and the ITU have treated the geography and persistence of the interference as evidence of deliberate activity.^13,28 Assessing a receiver's measurements and attributing interference are separate tasks. The aircraft needs a basis for checking its navigation inputs even while the question of intent remains unresolved.

06 // NEXT

Testing on the Honolulu bench

In progress · Honolulu bench · AL-2603 backplane modules · Report to follow

SSX360 is applying this approach to avionics hardware on its Honolulu bench. Testing on AL-2603 backplane modules is in progress; results will be reported in a later edition.

The work examines current draw during boot, the timing of signing operations, and responses to controlled supply-rail glitches. These measurements can help distinguish firmware states and check whether observed behavior agrees with the board's reported configuration.

A corrupted bootloader may return the expected version string. Power traces and timing measurements provide additional evidence, but their ability to distinguish states has to be established under the test conditions. No single trace proves firmware integrity.

The bench work uses ChipWhisperer and J-Link to test candidate firmware states and record the observations used to exclude them. The planned report will document the candidate set, tests, reasons for each exclusion, and a signed evidence bundle, following the case-ledger format used here. That work is still under way.

SOURCES

References

1. Rambler / RIA Novosti, "Над Россией в ночь на 10 октября сбили 560 БПЛА", 10 Oct 2026. Russian MoD count, 20:00 to 08:00. news.rambler.ru/army/57202913
2. Ukrainska Pravda, "Major fire reported at Russian oil-loading terminal in Rostov Oblast after drone attack", 10 Oct 2026. pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/10/10/8057315
3. 161.ru, "В Батайске повреждены «Магнит» и жилые дома после атаки БПЛА", 10 Oct 2026, 15:17. More than 100 UAVs downed or suppressed over Rostov Oblast; Magnit building, private houses and five cars damaged in Bataysk. 161.ru/text/incidents/2026/10/10/76692704
4. Astra via Caliber.az, "Обломок зенитной ракеты упал в магазине «Магнит» в Батайске", 10 Oct 2026, 20:08 MSK. 9M335 (Pantsir) booster stage, presumptive; address Aviatsionnaya 30; source video from the Supernova+ channel. caliber.az/post/astra-oblomok-zenitnoj-rakety-upal-v-magazine-magnit-v-batajske
5. RIA Novosti, "В Батайске ликвидируют возгорание в незаселенном доме после атаки БПЛА", 10 Oct 2026, 06:17, quoting Governor Yuri Slyusar. ria.ru/20261010/ataka-2123621864.html
6. Magnit PJSC, "Magnit reports its 1H 2026 operational and financial results", 28 Aug 2026: 33,652 stores in 72 regions as of 30 June 2026. magnit.com
7. GeoSudoku, methodology post, Telegram, 11 Oct 2026. t.me/geosudoku/187 (requires the Telegram client; the web preview does not render the post).
8. The Moscow Times (Russian edition), "В Подмосковье разгонный блок ракеты ПВО упал на крышу пассажирского автобуса", 23 Oct 2025. Sofyino, Moscow region; route 402; operator first cited drone debris. ru.themoscowtimes.com/2025/10/23
9. Kyiv Independent, "Russia's own air defense missile reportedly hits apartment building in Rostov-on-Don", 14 Jan 2026. One killed, four injured; mayor attributed the fire to drone debris. kyivindependent.com
10. T. Murphy (Boeing), "GNSS RFI", presentation to the ICAO NAM/CAR/SAM Radionavigation Workshop, Sep 2026 (file dated 26 Aug 2026): 305,510 legs, 90,532 with a GPS event; FIR rates; 92% recovery. icao.int/sites/default/files/SAM/MeetingDocs/2026/0902-Taller-Radionavegacion-NAMCARSAM/
11. Thomas, Murphy, Nguyen, Wilkins (Boeing), "Boeing's Approach to Mitigating the Impacts of GNSS RFI", Inside GNSS, 4 Aug 2026. insidegnss.com/boeings-approach-to-mitigating-the-impacts-of-gnss-rfi
12. EU Today, "Baltic–Nordic report: Russian GNSS interference disrupted almost 123,000 flights in four months", 8 Sep 2025; ERR/SVT, 7 Sep 2025. Joint submission to ICAO by Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. eutoday.net/russian-gnss-interference-disrupted-123000-flights
13. ICAO Newsroom, "ICAO Assembly condemns GNSS Radio Frequency Interference originating from the DPRK and the Russian Federation", 3 Oct 2025; Resolution A42-2. icao.int/news
14. ICAO Council, A42-WP/553, 12 Sep 2025, recording the ITU Radio Regulations Board conclusion (98th meeting, March 2025) that the interference source lies within Russian territory. icao.int/sites/default/files/Meetings/a42/Documents/WP/wp_553_en.pdf
15. OPSGROUP, "GPS Spoofing: Final Report of the GPS Spoofing WorkGroup", 6 Sep 2024: about 1,500 flights a day spoofed versus 300 in the first half of 2024. ops.group/blog/gps-spoofing-final-report
16. B. Figuet, R. Monstein (SkAI Data Services), GPS spoofing white paper, 2025: over 310,000 flights affected in 2024. gpswise.aero/white_paper.pdf
17. IATA, "Safety Risk Assessment: GNSS Interference", v4, Sep 2024: ~580,000 signal-loss instances in ~18.4 million flights, Aug 2021 to Jun 2024; 28.1 per 1,000 (2021) to 50.8 (H1 2024). iata.org
18. Press Trust of India / Business Standard, "Rising GPS interference incidents raise safety concerns for pilots: IATA", 14 Dec 2025: 31 (2022), 56 (2024), 59 projected (2025) per 1,000 flights. business-standard.com
19. To Vima, "Kremlin denies GPS jamming of von der Leyen's aircraft", 1 Sep 2025; European Commission spokesperson statements, 1 Sep 2025. tovima.com
20. Flightradar24, "Ursula von der Leyen GPS jamming", 4 Sep 2025: NIC 8 / NACp 10 throughout; nine minutes over schedule. flightradar24.com/blog/aviation-explainer-series/ursula-von-der-leyen-gps-jamming
21. European Pravda, 3 Sep 2025 (PM Zhelyazkov: no investigation, not treated as a hybrid attack); BTA, "PM Zhelyazkov: No GPS Interference Detected during 'Plovdiv Landing'", 4 Sep 2025. bta.bg/en/news/960380
22. Euronews, "Examining contradicting claims of Russian GPS jamming targeting von der Leyen's flight", 9 Sep 2025 (Transport Minister Karadjov). euronews.com
23. The Defense Post, "Ukraine Spoofs Nearly 100 Shahed Drones to Head Back to Russia", 5 Dec 2024, citing Le Monde, 26 Nov 2024. thedefensepost.com/2024/12/05/ukraine-spoofs-shahed-drones
24. United24 Media, "Ukraine sends Shahed drones back to Russia and Belarus using spoofing technology", 27 Nov 2024; Ukrainian Air Force statement, 26 Nov 2024. united24media.com
25. O'Connor et al., RTI International, "Economic Benefits of the Global Positioning System (GPS)", June 2019 (sponsored by NIST, GCR 25-062): $1 billion per day; planting-season impact up to 50% higher. rti.org/sites/default/files/gps_finalreport.pdf
26. Engineering (Elsevier), news feature quoting co-author Kyle Clark-Sutton, 2019. doi:10.1016/j.eng.2019.10.007
27. London Economics for the UK Space Agency, "The economic impact on the UK of a disruption to GNSS", published 18 Oct 2023: £1,424 million for a 24-hour outage. gov.uk/government/publications/report-the-economic-impact-on-the-uk-of-a-disruption-to-gnss
28. Air & Space Forces Magazine, "Russian Jamming Is Wreaking Havoc on GPS in Eastern Europe. But Is It Hybrid Warfare?", May 2024, quoting Tapio Pyysalo, Hybrid CoE. airandspaceforces.com/russian-gps-jamming-nato-ukraine