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Notes -
Basically what @Dean said. As one of those "blob-adjacent boomer types with a Jane's subscription" I was skeptical that the Russian Army, which prior to 2022 had not concentrated and deployed in anything larger than division strength since the early 90s, had the personnel, infrastructure, and institutional knowledge needed to pacify a country of 45 million people. I remember a conversation where a pro-Russian poster was touting the effectiveness of the "filtration camp" model in Chechnya, and asking how exactly the Russian government planned to forcibly inter, and subsequently feed/house/transport 4 - 5 million people because that was the scale of the project he was suggesting if he wanted to achieve a proportional effect. I never got an answer.
Meanwhile on the Ukrainian side, my impression just following regional politics was that 2014 had lit a fire under the asses of the Ukrainian nationalists and that the Ukrainian Government/Military had put bunch of effort in the intervening years into tamping down corruption in the armed forces and generally "getting their shit together". Accordingly I predicted that the UAF were likely a lot more capable of and willing to put up a fight than many were giving them credit for.
Finally Ukraine's growing economic and cultural ties with Poland and Romania suggested to me that popular sentiment in Ukraine was genuinely on the side of further European integration, which in turn made me skeptical of Russian claims that their troops would be welcomed as liberators anywhere outside the regions they already de facto controlled (IE Crimea and the separatist regions of the Donbass).
Near as I can tell none of these impressions can were really based on "western propaganda" or assuming that "Russia was/is a joke" they were simply extrapolations based on a combination of available information and prior-experience
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