Version of TAR in tarfile module? TAR 1.14 or 1.15 port to Windows?

[Claudio Grondi]

I need to unpack on a Windows 2000 machine
some Wikipedia media .tar archives which are
compressed with TAR 1.14 (support for long file
names and maybe some other features) .
It seems, that Pythons tarfile module is able to list far
more files inside the archives than WinRAR or 7zip or
TotalCommander, but will it unpack all available files
(largest archive size 17 GByte)?

If tarfile is build on TAR 1.14 or TAR 1.15 it will be
probably ok, so my questions are:

What TAR version is built into the tarfile module?

Is there a TAR 1.14 or 1.15 port to Windows
available in Internet for download (which URL)?

Claudio