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I assume you mean the Russian one? Sure. I was noting they still weren't committed until they were, but I was one of the realtively people on the forums arguing that the invasion threat was credible and shouldn't be dismissed because of visible factors. It was a relatively minority position back then due to European inclinations to reference the Iraq War intelligence failures / this was American fearmongering / a very memorable denunciation that I knew nothing of slavic brotherhood.
I wasn't sure if the intervention would be tailored to the Donbass and if the other forces were diversionary (they did appear to be too small for a full invasion, but enough for a significant impact), and I believed (and still do) that Putin might have pulled back at the time if he got some of the geopolitical concessions he was angling for at the time (like the Nord Stream pipeline completion). I even thought Ukraine would crumple.
But I was very much against 'this is just another drill.'
Among other things fact that the Russians had left equipment near Ukraine in 2021, and then not taken it back home with them, allowing it to be proximal and staged so that when they did the 2021 exercise it was building up new force capabilities that were far beyond normal levels. This was significant because when Russia or equivalent countries do a military exercise, they generally don't actually bring enough to do a full invasion and it's visible from orbit. The fact that Russia didn't take it's equipment back home, but then brought in another small army's worth of stuff, and then kept bring more stuff in, was the visibly apparent 'they have an invasion-scale force assembled' which they didn't need if they were 'just' doing exercises.
Additionally, 2021 had multiple developments that correlated with pre-conflict shaping, including a massive pre-invasion propaganda campaigns both against Ukraine (fake nation, nazi narratives) and international legitimization by framing it against NATO (the NATO infrigement/withdrawal demands), the European energy non-refil in which they didn't go through their normal practice of filling European gas stocks during the summer per normal practices, and there was the Russian dynamic behind the Belarusian migrant crisis which was a challenge / shaping perceptions of the new German government.
You misremember. The propaganda campaigns were in 2021 mostly, but they were very consistent with pre-war justificaiton narratives, on three grounds- trying to prep the target population (we are you liberators / brothers freeing you from despotic rule), the home population (Russia is standing up for itself for historical Russian brotherhood and territory), and internationally (are war is historically justified and also it's NATO's fault).
The Russian funds were frozen, but the anamolous economic behavior pre-invasion was the effort to increase European dependence on Russian imports through supply chain artificial shortages of gas.
Notably, in turn, the Russian funds not being immediately moved was a reflection of how the Russians thought the conflict would go (a quick fait accompli the Europeans would ascede to), which has generally been understood to be a mistake for a long-war (which a Taiwan blockade would likely be).
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