25.10.2019.
Slavic Shield 2019 joint tactical exercise
President Vučić: We are drastically boosting our military capabilities
- Today we had a unique opportunity to see how the S 400 battalion works and to see how Pantsir S works. As you know, we have purchased, ordered one Pantsir S system, and we are expecting it in our country soon. This is a fantastic system that targets all flying objects, especially drones and cruise missiles at the distance of up to 80 kilometers, tracks everything and it is very difficult to jam their radar, because they have many different codes and many different approaches. Our people are overjoyed, they are training, and I expect that in the next month or two, they will be able to show their lethal effect on an exercise in Serbia also on such cruise missiles and small drones, which are very dangerous for anti-aircraft systems. As for the S 400 – if we had two S 400 battalions, no one would ever dare overfly Serbia or would even think to overfly Serbia – president of the Republic of Serbia and commander-in-chief of the Serbian Armed Forces, Aleksandar Vučić, said as he, accompanied by minister of defence Aleksandar Vulin and chief of General Staff of the Serbian Armed Forces, Lieutenant General Milan Mojsilović, attended the Distinguished Visitors Day within the exercise Slavic Shield 2019 at the Colonel-pilot Milenko Pavlović Air Base in Batajnica.
The president emphasised that we do not have a S 400, but, as he added, we are happy to have opportuity to see what it looks like.- At 600 kilometers you can see everything, you are already shooting at 380 kilometers and it is not only by chance that this is the best system in the world. I did not believe it, and I saw a moment ago that it took us less than five minutes to destroy all the targets; 14 air formations were attacking the Republic of Serbia and in the true sense, they were marking the targets and destroying them. It is interesting that one missile, when you are firing, is about 0.98, which means 98 percent hits that target, and they usually fire two at one target, and there is 99.99 percent and there can be no failure – president Vučić said.
Speaking about the Pantsir S system, President Vučić emphasised that it also hits fantastically, with an accuracy of about 95 percent.
- These are terrible tools. When people ask whether we would like – yes, we would like it at this moment, only if the Russians would leave it to us, we could not afford the S 400 otherwise. These are systems that guarantee you safety and security for your people and your country, for generations to come, and if we could afford it one day, we will be able so, but we are dramatically strengthening, and I am grateful to our Russian friends for noticing it – president Vučić emphasised.
According to him, we are drastically boosting our military capabilities and although we are a small country, we are still not strong enough, but we are many times stronger than we were.
- With Pantsir coming, these are big things for us. Please look at the Serb soldiers to see their smiling faces and how happy they are because of everything they saw. And about the S 400 when we got into the cabin – that is where you defend the whole country from. This is incredible power, incredible strength and I congratulate once again our Russian friends for creating such systems and we learn a lot from them, we have learned a lot. I am happy that today we were able to see Brigadier General Tiosav Janković, who was there for training, who knows a lot and is very important for the establishment of these systems and their operation here on the territory of the Republic of Serbia – president Vučić said, emphasizing that he had never seen such a thing in his life, even though he was at strategic military airports not far from Moscow.
President Vučić, accompanied by minister Vulin and chief of General Staff of the Serbian Armed Forces, General Mojsilović, visited the Exercise Command, where he was able to see the radar picture of the airspace situation, where exercise director, commander of the 250th Air Defence Missile Brigade, Brigadier General Tiosav Janković.
After that, President Vučić also visited the positions of the Pantsir S 1 air defence missile-gun system and S 400 air defence missile-gun system, where the crews demonstrated the operation of the system in a real situation, as part of a joint live-fire tactical exercise of air defence missile units of Serbian Air Defence and Russian Aerospace Forces dubbed Slavic Shield 2019, involving the weapons of the Serbian Armed Forces and the mentioned air defence missile systems from the composition of the Russian Aerospace Forces.Deputy commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces, lieutenant general Yury Nikolayevich Grehov, handed President Vučić a model of the Pantsir S1 system at the end of the tour, on the occasion of conducting a joint exercise.
The visit was also attended by Major General Duško Žarković, Commander of Air Force and Air Defence, members of the Ministry of Defence and the Serbian Armed Forces, as well as Major General Sergey Viktorovich Babakov, commander of the Russian Air Defence, and Colonel Andrey Vyacheslavovich Dugin, representative of the Air Defence Centre of the “Zhukov” Military Academy.A joint tactical live-fire exercise with air defence missile units of the Serbian Air Defence units and the Russian Aerospace Forces dubbed Slavic Shield 2019, is currently in progress in the territory of the Republic of Serbia. The aim of the exercise is to educate and use the joint group of the Serbian Air Defence and the Russian Aerospace Forces in the air defence of the territory and military forces against reconnaissance and enemy activities from the airspace, as well as to training and practicing of commands and units for the preparation and execution of an air defence operation.
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