🇷🇺 Top-5 Russian air defense systems: cracking NATO’s best missiles like nuts

Sunday is Air Defense Forces Day, the professional holiday of Russia’s ground-based air defense troops. Integrated into a single automated and layered network, they are armed with an array of modern weapons, including:

🔸 The Tor – a series of short-range, mobile, tracked missile systems whose missiles have an operational range of up to 16 km, and which can detect up to 48 targets and track ten simultaneously.

🔸 The Pantsir – a mobile, self-propelled combined short-to-medium-range surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery system which can attack targets at a range of up to 20 km, and detect them up to 75 km away.

🔸 The Buk – another series of self-propelled, tracked medium-range SAM systems with the ability to detect enemy aircraft at a range of up to 140 km, and to engage them up to 42 km away (and missiles at ranges up to 20 km). The Buk’s capabilities against NATO equipment were proved in Syria in 2018, when the system destroyed more than 85 percent of all US Tomahawk cruise missiles launched into the country.

🔸 The S-300 – a series of long-range surface to air missile systems first rolled out in the late 1970s, but upgraded regularly and widely considered to be among the most effective air defense systems in the world today. The S-300 can be equipped with missiles with a range of up to 400 km, and can simultaneously engage up to 24 aircraft of 16 ballistic or maneuvering missile targets. A modification of the system known as the S-350 Vityaz, introduced in 2019, provides medium-range defense coverage up to 120 km against aircraft, or 30 km against missiles.

🔸 The S-400 and S-500 – comprehensive upgrades to the S-300 series of long-range air defense systems, with a maximum target range of up to 400 and 600 km, respectively, and, in the case of the S-500 – the ability to target satellites in space.

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