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I have read articles about war events in Armenia-Azerbaijan, mentioning Azeri drone or loitering munition attacks on Armenian anti-aircraft missile batteries. Specially, there is one Armenian S-300 battery said to have been destroyed by such an attack.

There is a video relayed in some article that is said to show the drone attack on the S-300 battery. However, it looks like everyone took and relayed the info but those elements are evidently not sufficient proofs. There are no explosions or any other way to acknowledge the destruction of the system in the video. The final frame(s) show the radar being targeted

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I am not a military expert but can someone identify a system in such a video? Are there any other sources (videos, combat reports, etc.) that confirm the report of the S-300 being destroyed?

Fizz
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totalMongot
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  • @F1Krazy: thanks for the edition, I re-added the term "loitering munition" because it is a true term for some kind of weapons (like IAI Harop) and I saw this word used for weapons used by Azeris – totalMongot Jan 10 '21 at 17:20
  • The video is not seem to depict S-300s being attacked. It is really poor quality, but three things point to it not being S-300: 1) the vehicles are stand-alone. 2) they do not depict the S-300 typical launch tubes, and do not look like the S-300 command and control vehicles 3) all vehicles in the video appears to have a rotary antenna, which none of the S-300 vehicles have. If I was to guess, I would say the vehicles in the video are 9K33 Osa, NATO reporting name "SA-8 Gecko". The 1 big oval + 2 small + 1 rotary configuration indicates that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K33_Osa –  Jan 10 '21 at 17:37
  • @MichaelK what it is I can't tell from the video but it's definitely not an SA-8. The radar antenna is way too large, and the vehicle seems to be a trailer mounted container with just the radar on it. Which would fit one of the elements of an S300 battery. – jwenting May 16 '23 at 13:11

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I can't speak to its destruction, but the radar appears to be a 36D6 (which is shot from a high-angle). This type of radar is sometimes used to augment S-300 batteries, according to Polish Wikipedia.

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According to the very sketchy Russian Wikipedia page for it, the broader name of the radar system is ST-68, with several other similarly looking models in existence: ST-68 (5N59), ST-68U (19J6 or 19G6, depending on translation), ST-68UM (35D6 / 36D6). More photos here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:ST-68U

The one in the video might actually be one of the earlier models ST-68U (19G6 / 19J6) based on the presence of the small inner antennae, apparently absent in later models

enter image description here

Furthermore, there is another video from the same "Caliber" source showing something that appears to be a transport-erector-launcher (TEL) being targeted, which could be an S-300 TEL.

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In the 1st video of that series, the Az "Caliber" media source claims the attack took place in the region of Qubadli (Губадлы). It's hard to find independent verification of such claims, publicly posted, anyway.

The Az ministry of def posted on Oct 17 a different video showing some explosions and claiming destruction of an S-300. It's possible the earlier vids (Oct 10-11) just show some scouting missions, or maybe it was a different attack. I've read in some commentary that you see in the latter video is a strike by a LORA missile, but the target is pretty hard to discern.

Fizz
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  • "Caliber" doesn't seem to be the exclusive source of these vids; the TEL targeting has also been posted by "Military News" without the Caliber logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaLeYemgLjc And likewise for the radar targeting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8GZaKHoaUw posted by "AzVision English". I'm guessing the original source is some Az ministry video(s), but I can't locate it/them. – Fizz Jan 10 '21 at 21:59