Regarding the now-famous photograph:
The best comment on the subject is a picture by an unknown genius that I saw on ostrich_s. It says it all:
Incidentally, Kommersant writes that the motorcade was accompanied by at least one more identical "Kalina"—to replace the first one if necessary: *But then the lead car stopped. Around its rear right wheel, a small crowd instantly formed of people eager to understand what had happened and to help, help, help. It turned out there was some strange scraping noise, and that was why the prime minister braked. Perhaps he thought the tire had burst and the cord was scraping against the concrete. But apparently everything was fine. Finally, they found several stones wedged into the gap between the rim and the tire—they were the ones making the nervous scraping sound. *There was just one thing I still didn’t understand: where, judging by this story, did an exactly identical canary-yellow Lada Kalina Sport, only with different license plates, instantly appear in the motorcade from? And how many more of them were hidden in the bushes along the roadside just in case over the entire more than two thousand kilometers of the historic Khabarovsk–Chita highway.