Estonia will purchase the Polish Piorun MANPADS

Poland and Estonia plan to sign an agreement to export the Piorun man-portable air-defense systems.

Defense24.pl reported about this with reference to its own sources.

This regards several dozen launchers and hundreds of missiles, the Polish military publication writes.

The agreement is planned to be signed next week.

Estonia will become the second among the Baltic states to operate the Polish MANPADS. In 2014, Lithuania purchased the first batch of Grom portable anti-aircraft missile systems.

Piorun MANPADS is a deeply modernized version of the Polish Grom missile system, which is produced by Mesko. Within this upgrade, the sensitivity of the infrared homing device was quadrupled.

Piorun MANPADS is also in service with the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Poland transferred a certain number of these systems to Ukraine even before the beginning of the Russian invasion in February 2022.

The Ukrainian servicemen have repeatedly shot down Russian helicopters and drones using those missiles. Piorun can strike small credible targets, such as UAVs, due to contactless undermining.

The man-portable air defense system has a warhead of 1.82 kg, and it is known to be able to hit targets at an altitude of up to 4000 m and a range of up to 6500 m.

The Piorun MANPADS is the state-of-the-art development of the Poles. The Armed Forces of the Ministry of Defense of Poland had only themselves started to use this weapon in 2019.

In June 2022, the Ministry of Defense of Poland signed a contract to purchase the 3,500 missiles for this system.

Piorun missiles are also used in the Poprad and the PSR-A Pilica air-defense systems.