Stories about Russian tanks running out of gas reminds me of a conversation I had with a relative in 2010. That was during my "Kazakhstan year", but at one point I was back in the U.S. and at a family event. My mother's cousin is a fairly accomplished architect and at that time he was doing a lot of work in Russia, mostly designing mansions for Russian oligarchs.
I was talking to him about the weird cultural phenomenon I had noticed in Kazakhstan, where the bearer of bad news would often be blamed for whatever was going wrong. That meant that people were really reluctant to tell the truth when something bad happened, even when not telling the bad news would obviously lead to an even worse outcome. My relative claimed that phenomenon existed in Russia too and was really a major problem if you were, for example, trying to manage a big construction project. On the projects he worked on, Russian workers would hide relatively minor and easy to correct issues until they became major problems. One of the reasons that his building projects were so much more expensive than the original estimates is all of the money and delays required to fix those major problems that didn't start out as anything major.
At one point he said something like (I am paraphrasing from an almost 12 year old memory): "People are afraid of Russian tanks rolling into Poland. But if that ever happened, they would all run out of gas before they reached Warsaw. That's because the tank crew will have sold half of the fuel to their brother-in-law back in Russia. Then, when they are invading and the fuel gauge gets low, they would be afraid to report the problem to their superiors. So they would just ignore the problem and keep driving until the tank dies in the road."
Anyway, I have no idea if the news of out-of-fuel tanks littering the Ukrainian countryside area accurate, or if it is accurate, why that is happening. But I do keep thinking about that conversation.
