Business FM Sankt Peterburg: ‘The News in Facts, Not Just Words’
At times in my travel notes on visits to Petersburg, I have mentioned in passing that over breakfast I listen to the local radio station that is an offshoot of Moscow-based “Business FM.”
Their self-promoting commercials now inform listeners that you need not have a radio receiver to enjoy their programs: their broadcasts are accessible by App on your mobile phone or via their website on your computer: https://bfmspb.ru/ Thus, my Russian-speaking audience worldwide can sample this news outlet at any time.
I take pleasure in this radio station, because they talk about most everything except the war. So at a time of the day when I am just relaxing, on Business FM I do not have to hear General Konoshenkov’s daily report on the numbers of Ukrainian Army casualties, the numbers of tanks, armored vehicles and artillery pieces destroyed. Instead I hear about the exchange rate, about the shortfalls in Treasury revenues last month due to depressed oil and gas exports, about the rise in car loans to buyers of new and used vehicles as the Russian automobile market revives and about a lot of other topics that come in a mixed bundle, some of it useful, some less so.
Today Business FM had one news item of far reaching importance: about the complaints of Moscow car sharing companies over the disruption to their business from the collapse of geolocalization services. At issue is the current failure of GPS “navigators” on board all the taxis and other cars for hire. And farther up the data flow, there is the failure of automatic dispatch systems of taxi companies directing drivers to their clients.
By “failure” I mean the false locations that the system provides due to the intervention of the Russian military and security organizations. The logic of their intervention is to foil all drones and other devices that are guided by satellite-provided geolocation coordinates. But the impact of the intervention affects most everyone.
I know from personal experience of our return home from the dinner party with friends in the city center to our home in the outlying borough of Pushkin on Victory Day, 9 May. I clicked on the “Yandex Go” application on my mobile phone. It instantly showed our current street address and then I typed in our destination address. In a moment, the App confirmed that a driver would come to pick us up in 7 minutes.
For those unfamiliar with the name “Yandex,” it is the Russian equivalent of Google. Yandex is the most widely used search engine in Russia and also is the provider of a great many other services including home delivery of supermarket purchases online and the biggest taxi system in Russia. They are technology leaders in this country, highly capable folks.
Well, the 7 minutes came and went. I checked again on the App and it appeared that the car never moved from its original location 2.6 km from us. Ten minutes further went by and the car was no closer to us. Meanwhile the screen informed me that I was being billed for the car’s waiting time since the driver was supposedly already at our address. I contacted the driver, who told me where he was – about 2.6 kilometers from us, and asked why we weren’t meeting him.
With some effort, I cancelled the order and spoke to a Yandex dispatcher by phone. She took down our location manuall. A few minutes later I got a new confirmation call that the car was on its way, and indeed we were eventually picked up and taken out to Pushkin. However, we had lost an hour sorting out our problem.
This whole matter of taking down the GPS services is quite sophisticated. This is not a simple case of jamming. It is altering the data provided to or from the satellites that maintain GPS services. And it is still going on in Moscow, here in Petersburg and I suppose also in other Russian cities.
All of this takes us back to the Victory Day parade in Moscow.
How is it that Vladimir Putin and his foreign guests, including the heads of state of former Soviet Republics, could sit calmly on the tribune and watch the parade just several days after the drone attack on the Kremlin? One possibility is that via back channels, the Kremlin had reached an agreement with Washington to ensure that the terrorists controlled by Kiev would not even think of attacking on Victory Day. We have reached the point in relations where a threat of instant strategic weapons attack on the USA is not outside the realm of our imagination.
However, I find it more likely that the Kremlin satisfied itself that its own technical means could ensure safety on Red Square. And surely one of the key technical means was the disruption of all GPS services that the drones, missiles and other attack weapons use for guidance. I suppose that this disruption of GPS and/or the Russian equivalent (GLONASS) explains the decision to cancel the air show over Moscow that is normally part of the parade.
Thanks to Business FM, we now can get our minds around the war and its consequences without spoiling the morning pondering body counts.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023