In recent weeks, it is not necessarily advisable to take a taxi in Moscow, if you do not know exactly where you are going. Natalia experienced this twice. “The first time was on May 4 or 5, coming back from vacation. My taxi told me that he didn’t really know where to drop me off because his browser wasn’t working.” The situation happened again on Monday, May 22. “The driver told me the navigator wasn’t working. I know the way, so I told him where to turn.”
The Yandex company which manages most Moscow taxis had to modify its application so that users could manually enter their address, drivers sometimes have great difficulty finding them. The GPS works badly in Moscow, this is confirmed by specialized sites which analyze the quality of the signal which is currently strongly degraded in several cities of Russia.
No official explanation
During the last Moscow half-marathon, some runners saw their watch telling them that they had run 35 kilometers instead of 21. This observation is recognized by the Russian authorities, but no official explanation has been given. Some media mention voluntary jamming for security reasons. It can be noted that the quality of the GPS signal seems to have deteriorated sharply from May 4, just after the alleged drone attack on the Kremlin. More recently, from Monday May 22 to Tuesday May 23, a group of pro-Ukraine Russian partisans carried out an attack in Russia. The most important of its kind. Russian authorities admitted on Tuesday that at least one civilian had been killed and several injured.