Russia offers Bizon counter-drone system to Egypt

Russia’s state defense conglomerate Rostec is marketing an export version of its Zubr short-range counter-drone system, called Bizon, to potential customers in Egypt, according to a statement from the company’s High Precision Systems holding.

The system, designated TKB-1167 and developed by High Precision Systems, is armed with 7.62mm PKT machine guns and designed to engage small, low-flying aerial targets that Rostec said are difficult for traditional air defense systems to intercept. According to the company, the system detects and tracks drones independently using its own radar, then hands off targeting data to the machine gun mounts, leaving the human operator to make the final decision to fire.

“It is important that the development of our High Precision Systems is already on combat duty and successfully engaging real targets, demonstrating a high speed of reaction to the appearance of aerial threats,” said Bekhan Ozdoev, industrial director of Rostec’s weapons cluster and a member of the Bureau of the Union of Machine Builders of Russia. “In fact, the TKB-1167 is the last line of defense, coming into play when the count is measured in seconds. The system can be used both independently and as an element of a unified counter-drone defense architecture, building layered air defense for facilities.”

Ozdoev said the system can also integrate with external detection assets, receiving information from other sensors and supplementing that data with its own picture of the airspace, an approach Rostec has increasingly emphasized as drone threats to fixed infrastructure have grown more common.

The domestic version of the system, known as Zubr, has already been delivered to Russian military units, The Defence Blog reported in January. According to Rostec’s earlier statement on that delivery, the Zubr consists of four combat modules, a centralized command post and a radar, forming a self-contained air defense unit intended to protect critical infrastructure from drones and loitering munitions. Rostec described Zubr as a point-defense asset rather than a strategic interceptor, built to cover the immediate area around high-value sites rather than broader airspace, and did not disclose specific locations or unit assignments for the systems already fielded.

High Precision Systems, established in 2009 as a Rostec holding company, produces a range of Russia’s front-line weapons, including the Iskander-M ballistic missile system, the Pantsir-S air defense complex, the Kornet anti-tank missile and the BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicle. The holding reported revenue of roughly $1.98 billion as of 2016, the most recent figures publicly available, and has faced extensive international sanctions tied to weapons used in Russia’s military campaigns in Syria and Ukraine.

Egypt has been a recurring focus of Russian arms marketing efforts. Rosoboronexport, Rostec’s export arm, organized Russia’s national pavilion at the Egypt Defence Expo in December 2025, an event the two countries marked as the 70th anniversary of Russian-Egyptian military-technical cooperation. Egypt has previously acquired Russian counter-drone technology: in 2023, Rosoboronexport signed an agreement at that year’s EDEX exhibition to produce a separate Russian counter-drone system, called Zashchita, inside Egypt, describing that deal at the time as falling under civilian rather than military cooperation. Rosoboronexport has said its overall military-technical cooperation spans more than 100 countries, with the agency handling more than 85 percent of Russia’s arms and military equipment exports.

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