A captured Russian tank from the war in Ukraine mysteriously showed up at a truck stop in Louisiana, report says

• A Russian tank mysteriously appeared off a highway in Louisiana on Tuesday, The War Zone reported.
• Nobody knows where the tank came from, or where it was supposed to go.
• Open-source intelligence groups think the tank was abandoned in Kharkiv last year, the outlet said.

A captured Russian tank from the war in Ukraine mysteriously showed up at a truck stop in Louisiana, military publication The War Zone reported on Thursday.

Employees at Peto's Travel Center and Casino in Roanoke, Louisiana, told the outlet they were stumped when they saw that someone had left a Russian T-90A tank on a truck trailer in their parking lot, which is located off the Interstate 10 highway.

"I've been here seven years," Valerie Mott, the assistant manager of the casino and travel center, told The War Zone. "I've never seen [a tank] here before."

The tank did not have any machine guns attached to it and had damaged front and rear fenders, The War Zone reported.

However, it did have explosive reactive armor containers on the turret and a Shtora-1 armored fighting vehicle defense system, which is common for Russian T90 tanks, the outlet said.

Open-source intelligence groups Oryx and Warspotting.net , who track military equipment used in Ukraine, told The War Zone that the tank most likely belonged to Russia's 27th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade and was abandoned in Kharkiv Oblast in September last year.

"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)," the groups told The War Zone.

Cody Sellers, who manages Peto's Travel Center and Casino, told The War Zone that nobody knew where the tank came from, or where it was supposed to go.

Some staff did add that a group of men had dropped the tank off on Tuesday, saying that the truck they were transporting it on had broken down and that they needed to travel to Houston to get a new one.

The men were not identified and have not returned it yet.

Spokespeople from two nearby military bases — one in Fort Polk, which is around 60 miles north, and one in New Boston, Texas, which is about 240 miles north of the truck stop — said it did not immediately appear the tank was headed there.

"My opinion is this tank is probably owned by a private citizen or company," the Fort Polk spokesperson told The War Zone. "It doesn't seem likely the military would leave something like that unattended."

Insider was unable to independently verify the report. Spokespeople for the Pentagon, the Russian military, and the Ukrainian Ground Forces did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.

Since the start of Russia's invasion last year, Ukrainian troops have been reusing captured Russian tanks in battle . This would be the first time one of these tanks would have appeared outside of the area of conflict.