Even if they misplaced the tanks themselves. From the Telegraph:

‘There are tanks all over the forest, abandoned,’ an unnamed reporter on the video says. ‘If you need one, come and get it.’

Locals in a nearby village said the tanks had been sitting there for almost four months covered in snow. The armoured vehicles were identified as a mixture of T-80 and T-72 battle tanks, the workhorses of the Russian army.

Who has time to worry about where they left an entire armored regiment’s worth of tanks? What with the nation-state collapsing anyways and all manner of intrigue on every conceivable frontier… Or are the Russians early adopters of the “tanks do not equal power projection” school?