The 726th Army Air Defense Training Center located in Yeysk (the Krasnodar Krai) in southern Russia has received the first batch shipment of the Tor-M2DT surface-to-air missile system (SAM), the Russian Defense Ministry said. "Under the state defense order the manufacturing plant has supplied a battalion of combat vehicles to the Russian Defense Ministry. At present, the teaching staff of the training center has got down to checking technical documents and full operational capacity of combat modules, life-sustaining systems and specialized equipment. Northern Fleet’s servicemen will use Tor-M2DT for training after all the acceptance procedures are over," the ministry said.

Tor-M2DT displayed at Armya-2018 (Picture source: Army Recognition)

Tor-M2DT is an Arctic variant of the Tor-M2 SAM missile system designed for anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense at the level of a battalion air wing. Tor-M2DT protects vital administrative facilities and the first echelons of land formations from anti-radar and cruise missiles; glide bombs, aircraft, helicopters and drones. The system functions in manual and fully automatic regimes. Tor-M2DT controls the designated air space itself and shoots down independently all the targets which have not been identified by the friend-or-foe system.

Tor-M2DT has bene developed on the basis of a two-link tractor for operation in the hard conditions of the Arctic and the Extreme North. It is capable of working in freezing temperatures reaching minus 50 degrees Celsius. To improve its cross-country capability Tor-M2DT has been mounted on the chassis of the DT-30 articulated tracked vehicle capable of crossing water obstacles and going through impassible roads. Tor-M2DT comprises 16 vertical launch surface-to-air missiles with a range of destruction of up to 12 kilometers and a high-flying range of up to 10,000 meters. A modernized track detection center is capable of detecting flying craft created with the use of radar visibility reduction technology.