Russia says its new tanks can "defeat" drones, deploys them to front

That claim of superiority over foreign systems sits awkwardly alongside a body of independent reporting, including prior coverage from The Defence Blog itself, documenting serious and specific technical problems with exactly the capability Izvestia’s sources are now promoting.

Russia really is full of bullshitters isn't it?

In particular I believe these active protection systems are using suboptimal sensors not optimized to detect drones by exploiting the phenomena that at the leading edge of a vertical rotor blade travelling forward the velocity of the drone and of the blade combine to an extremely quick velocity which creates certain phenomena a sensor designed for much faster, metallic and larger objects can detect under certain conditions.

Murakhovsky specifically noted that conventional radar detection methods, including Doppler-based systems that work well against fast-moving missiles, perform poorly against drones that move slowly and unpredictably at low altitude, precisely the flight profile an FPV drone pilot uses to approach a tank.

It isn't a real solution, it is a hack to make what they already have available for industrial production and use have some positive benefit.

https://defence-blog.com/russias-tank-active-protection-effort-has-failed/

However, Murakhovsky stated that the radar’s inability to separate small airborne objects from ground clutter at short distances remains a critical limitation. The algorithms used for target detection, tracking, and prioritization, he said, are still not developed enough to handle drones that move unpredictably and at low speed.

According to Murakhovsky, methods traditionally used in air-defense radars — including Doppler detection and moving target indication — are ineffective against UAVs with a very small radar cross-section and low velocity, particularly when they operate close to terrain features or at very low altitude.

https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2026/russias-t-90m-arena-m-sighting-reveals-how-drone-warfare-is-driving-the-evolution-of-tank-survivability

Arena-M should be assessed with technical caution. It is not Russia’s first hard-kill APS concept, since the Soviet Union previously fielded limited active protection systems such as Drozd, but it represents Russia’s most serious attempt to bring a modern hard-kill defensive suite onto the T-90M Proryv fleet. The system builds on earlier Soviet and Russian active protection work while adapting the concept to a threat environment now shaped by ATGMs, RPGs, FPV drones, loitering munitions, and top-attack strike profiles. In NATO terminology, Arena-M belongs to the hard-kill active protection category, using radar surveillance, trajectory calculation, and countermunition launch to physically defeat an incoming threat before impact.

...

Army Recognition’s December 2025 patent analysis adds the most important technical depth to this development. According to the report, documentation published by Russia’s Federal Institute of Industrial Property on December 24, 2025, showed that KBM Kolomna had received patent No. 2853544 for an APS method intended to engage not only missiles and projectiles but also attack drones. The patent describes a classic APS baseline mode in which a Doppler radar detects a fast incoming round at a fixed waiting distance, measures its coordinates and radial velocity, then moves the radar focus inward through updated range gates until the target enters the kill zone. The processor predicts where and when the projectile will cross that zone, selects a protective munition, and commands its detonation so that the fragmentation field intersects the incoming threat.

The patent’s deeper innovation is its attempt to adapt that logic to small multirotor drones, which are slower, smaller, and harder to classify than ATGMs or RPG-type projectiles. Army Recognition reported that the proposed method periodically switches the radar from the longer missile-detection waiting distance to a shorter drone-surveillance distance. At that closer range, the system looks for micro-Doppler modulation generated by rotating propellers rather than relying only on the drone body’s radar cross-section. Once detected, the drone is tracked through repeated coordinate measurements; the algorithm then calculates speed from the distance between successive coordinate points and the time between measurements, rather than relying on Doppler velocity that may be unreliable for hovering, shallow-angle, or maneuvering drones. This means the reported anti-drone upgrade is not simply a launcher modification, but a software, radar-processing, and target-classification problem.

Kind of sounds like making the best of tools that weren't designed for the job they are doing doesn't it? My first thought is so you have the FPV pilot about to ambush the T-90 cue the Javelin operator to fire and then what for the Arena system? The system has to pick right? Will russians inside even be able to reliably set the sensor to the correct mode in the heat of battle? Couldn't a bunch of harmless drones continuing to flip the sensors to drone mode make it a sitting duck for a Javelin type rocket? If Ukraine can get a Javelin into position they can certainly get a strike drone into position especially if it only needs to pose as a credible decoy.... if you think young people can't do this with drones you haven't played enough rocket league....