Tank drives across road in front of cars in Nizhny Tagil

Motorists in the Urals city of Nizhny Tagil were astonished when a tank shot at high speed across the road in front of them, local newspaper Tagil City reported on 27 January.

The incident was captured on video by a dashboard-mounted camera in the car that the tank happened to cut across. The tank missed the car by just a few metres, and the footage does not show whether it all took place at a crossroad or not.

The video records the chance reactions of the car driver and passengers:

“A tank’s crossing the road! Look, Alyona, a tank!”

“Where’s it going?”

“It's heading for the training ground”

“Look how fast it’s going!”

The footage shows that the tank drove across the highway on 26 January. The Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported that the incident took place near UralWagonZavod, a factory that happens to produce T-90 tanks.

Since the incident, UralWagonZavod have been using the video-clip as a viral video.

Komsomolskaya Pravda reports that this section of road is in the suburbs of Nizhny Tagil, on the way to the training ground, where tanks undergo field testing. The report notes that there is a traffic light at the intersection, which turns red if military vehicles need to cross the main highway. The video clip shows that just before the tank shot out across the highway, the traffic light did turn to red.

It is not unusual to see military vehicles on Russia’s roads. On 24 August 2012, a Mi-9 helicopter appeared on the main Ekaterinburg–Kurgan highway. A similar incident occurred on August 9 in the Rostov Region when an SU-24 bomber aircraft flew over the road at an altitude of just a few dozen metres. In both incidents, the Air Force confirmed that neither the pilot of the Mi-8 or the Su-24 had been involved in any kind of stunt, and that they were on official training missions.

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