Rosoboronexport put a weapon called the Dan-T on its stand at the El Alamein International Airshow in Egypt this week and described it as a loitering munition. Rostec, its parent, says the Dan-T reaches up to 450 kilometres, weighs up to 270 kilograms, carries a compact turbojet and flies at up to 500 kilometres an hour.
Nothing in that profile loiters. Russian state coverage of the reveal lists the launch platforms as the Yak-130, the MiG-29, the Mi-28N and the Mi-8, which is a release envelope for a stand-off missile rather than a weapon that circles over a target waiting for one to appear.
Alexander Stepanov, a military analyst at the Institute of Law and National Security at Russia’s presidential academy, told TASS the Dan-T is “visually similar” to the Banderol. That is the S8000, the cruise missile Kronshtadt built in 2025 and Russia has been firing at Ukraine since. Stepanov also said the weapon costs significantly less than Western equivalents such as Storm Shadow, which is the sales argument.
Rostec says hundreds of launches in Ukraine have confirmed the type’s effectiveness. That is the manufacturer’s claim about its own product and no independent assessment of it exists.
What Ukrainian intelligence found inside a Banderol
Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence published a component teardown of the S8000 on 12 May 2025, and the parts list is the reason the price is low.
The engine is a Swiwin SW800Pro, a Chinese turbojet built for large model aircraft, weighing 8.5 kilograms and producing 81.6 kilograms of thrust at 65,000 rpm. It sells online for roughly $16,000. The inertial navigation is Chinese. The telemetry module is an Australian-made RFD900x or a Chinese copy of one. The batteries are Murata, from Japan. The servos are Dynamixel units from the South Korean firm Robotis. Around twenty of the microchips come from the United States, China, Switzerland, Japan and South Korea.
The agency identified more than twenty key components and roughly thirty companies in the supply chain. It put the missile’s range at up to 500 kilometres, its warhead at up to 150 kilograms and its speed at 500 kilometres an hour, launched from Kronshtadt’s Orion drone with adaptation work under way for the Mi-28N.
Set that against the Dan-T figures Rostec published this week — 450 kilometres, 500 kilometres an hour, turbojet, helicopter and aircraft launch — and the two descriptions are close enough that Stepanov’s comparison is the obvious reading.
The label is not a technical description
FlightBrief analysis: calling a 450-kilometre air-launched jet weapon a loitering munition changes what a buyer thinks they are shopping for, not what the weapon is. The category has been drifting for two years, mostly in the other direction — NATO tenders now say “one-way effector” for systems that fly hundreds of kilometres to a fixed coordinate, because those do not loiter either.
It does not change the export rules. The Missile Technology Control Regime’s Category II covers complete systems that reach 300 kilometres, regardless of what they carry or what they are called. Russia has been a member since 1995. Egypt does not appear on the regime’s membership list.
The rest of the Rosoboronexport stand shows what the Dan-T was brought to sit alongside: the Lancet-E, the Kub-10E and the Kub-2E among the strike drones, plus the Su-57E fighter, the Pantsir-SMD-E air defence system and the Ka-52E helicopter. Alexander Mikheev, the company’s director general, called Egypt “Russia’s most important strategic partner” in the region.
The show ran from 8 to 10 September at El Alamein International Airport.
