Drone video released by a Ukrainian Soldier shows how Russian tanks can get upgraded to the second highest combat decoration available for inanimate objects in the Russian military.

There are four stages of equipment in the Russian military. First, you have occupied and active stage. This is the lowest honor you can have as a piece of Russian military equipment. Generally, this means you were manufactured somewhere around 1960, and have served from Afghanistan to Chechnya, and now Ukraine. At this stage, no honors are available to you as a piece of Russian armor.

Serve long enough though, and you might get upgraded to the next tier of becoming an abandoned piece of Russian military equipment. If you achieve this objective, you could find yourself fighting in some place like Africa or Syria with rebels who don't know what toilet paper is, or you could end up sitting as a permanent decoration in the town square of some unnamed and unmapped village in Afghanistan. The possibilities are endless, and some would argue this is the best case scenario for any piece of Russian equipment. On the highest ends, you could even end up as a display piece at a Marine Corps installation after the Taliban failed to use you effectively in a place like the Buji Bhast Pass.

The next stage after that however gets truly exciting for Russian equipment, and it requires a rare set of circumstances to happen. In order to be upgraded to a destroyed piece of Russian equipment, you have to stay in a state of near repair but abandonment for a period of no more than four weeks, and Russian troops bust be no further than 10km from your position. This will encourage enemies of the Russian military to come and destroy you outright, turning you into scrap metal so you can't be demoted back to the first tier of active and occupied equipment.

The only step above this is when you become an entrant into the Turret Toss Olympics. This is a rare breed of abandoned and destroyed Russian military equipment that very few pieces get to become. It's both an honor and a privilege to represent your armor type in the weekly Russian Turret Toss Olympics, but the only additional requirement is that before you're destroyed, your ammunition storage still has to be complete and in-tact, meaning the troops who occupied you at stage one never had a chance to actually get into the fight.

The more ammunition still inside the hold, the better your performance in the weekly Olympics. Top performers are entered into the once annual Funker530 Turret Toss competition, where the winner gets a piece of his hull shipped directly to Ace, better known as the King of Russia.

About the Author

Josh Brooks

Josh is an American writer and former USMC machine gunner with eight years of experience in ground combat arms throughout the GWOT. He is currently based in Texas and specializes in combat footage analysis and digital marketing.Follow Josh at OfficialJoshBrooks.com