The Russian military has accidentally tipped over a 40-ton battle tank while transporting it on a city street.
“They dropped a tank. It’s lying on the road,” traffic police in the Sakhalin region 9,000 kilometers east of Moscow was quoted as saying by the state-run TASS news agency.
Footage filmed by passersby showed the T-80 main battle tank upside-down with its crawler belt in the air and turret puncturing a hole in the asphalt.
“You got lucky,” the author of one of the videos told a shocked driver in front of the upturned tank as he surveyed the damage up close.
“It was a good tank. Almost ran over a car,” the video’s author said.
There were no injuries reported in the incident.
The Sakhalin.info outlet later published footage of soldiers and heavy equipment flipping the armored vehicle back on its wheels.
The Russian Armed Forces’ Eastern Military District reportedly said that the T-80, which costs $3 million to manufacture, did not suffer damages.
It blamed the incident on the driver of a heavy-equipment transport system who “allowed the T-80 tank to tip over from a platform onto the roadway” on a highway entering the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
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