"I'm some guy in the south who happens to like tanks from playing [the computer game]
War Thunder and stumbled upon this beauty," he said.
He lives near Peto’s and saw it while driving by.
The tank has damaged front and rear fenders.
It is clearly not fully kitted out, but it has at least some explosive reactive armor containers on the turret. It also has the "dazzlers" at least still fitted from the
Shtora-1 self-protection system. Its various machine guns have been removed.
It also notably lacks some western fire control systems.
While we don't know why the tank is in Louisiana or how it got there, a member of the
Oryx and
Warspotting.net OSINT groups that track military equipment used in the war in Ukraine, who uses the Twitter handle Naalsio, told
The War Zone his assessment is that it “belonged to Russia's 27th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade, 1st Guards Tank Army... It was abandoned in Kurylivka, Kharkiv Oblast (49.660195, 37.699288) around 25 September 2022. It was captured by Ukraine's 92nd Separate Mechanized Brigade, hence the yellow 9s on the tank while in Louisiana (this is the marking the 92nd puts on their equipment).”
