MOSCOW, October 18. /TASS/. Air defense forces from Russia and Serbia successfully coped with the tasks of their interoperability during the Slavic Shield 2021 joint drills that ended at the Batajnica airfield in the Balkan country, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported on Monday.

"A ceremony was held at the Batajnica airbase in Serbia to close the Slavic Shield 2021 joint air defense exercise. The drills brought together units of the armed forces of Russia and Serbia armed with Pantsyr surface-to-air missile/gun systems," the ministry said in a statement.

The personnel of both countries successfully practiced interoperability and the joint combat employment of air defense troops, the ministry stressed.

In the course of the drills, the joint Russian-Serbian military contingent coped with combat alert tasks to provide air defense for Belgrade, the Batajnica airbase and the Serbian central industrial region, the statement says.

"In the course of their joint combat alert, the units of the air defense taskforce operating in a difficult jamming environment repelled a notional enemy’s massive air strike, eliminating all the aerial targets with electronic launches of surface-to-air missile systems," the ministry said.

"The crews of combat vehicles of Pantsyr anti-aircraft missile/gun systems conducted a 170km march to a new positioning area and performed live-firing against aerial and ground targets at the Pasulyanske-Levade training ground," the statement says.