Ukrainian Defense Intelligence tracked down and struck another air defense system of the russian invasion army. A Tor anti-aircraft missile system was spotted by the 15th artillery reconnaissance brigade and quickly reported for a precision strike with a Warmate 3.0 loitering munition, or simply a kamikaze drone.
Defence Intelligence shared the footage that the Warmate filmed from the first-person-view perspective while approaching its target. Notably, the Tor tried to intercept the incoming threat but missed: the anti-aircraft missile exploded in front of the hostile UAV without considerable damage.
Read more: Ukrainian Kamikaze Drones with Machine Vision Destroy russian Pantsir-S1 (Video)
The results of the strike remain behind the scenes. We can only assume that the Warmate's 1.4 kg high-explosive warhead should have been capable of at least damaging vital subsystems, rendering the air defense system incapable until capital repairs or destroying it altogether.
As for the Tor's failed attempt to intercept the drone, the case is in point, because in russia, Tor is hailed as one of the most effective and efficient ways to counter unmanned aerial vehicles in particular. Tor carries its own standalone surveillance and targeting radar for close air defense support of nearby allied units. Accordingly, simple low-flying targets are exactly the type of threat it is supposed to take down. Defense Express delved deeper into the origins of Tor's anti-UAV role in our previous article, as we watched how a cheap FPV drone put it out of order.
However, unlike that episode, no one can justify the failure by a simple fact that the attackers chose the right moment when the Tor was in its transportation mode, and the folded radar just couldn't see the drone coming. This time around, it was a head-on duel in which a Polish-made drone came out victorious.
Just recently, the same type of drone, as identified by Defence24, was responsible for incapacitating two Pantsir-S1 anti-aircraft missile and gunnery systems of the russian army.
Although it's evident that Warmate 3.0 has become particularly successful in doing so, this success is not exclusive to this weapon. Tor systems were also observed struck by other types of attack UAVs and loitering munitions, such as RAM II or Switchblade 600.
According to the Oryx OSINT community, at least 49 russian Tor systems were either destroyed, damaged, or captured throughout the large-scale war against Ukraine since February 2022.
Read more: Best russian Anti-Drone System Tor-M1 Gets Hit with FPV Drone
