I was thinking of something among those lines, but also what IF they are actually behaving somewhat inept with the invasion to make NATO believe that they are really bad at waging war so they lower their guard while at the same time they get rid of their old shitty military equipment.
What we're seeing is almost entirely from the Ukrainian side, and they're not exactly going to put out videos like "WATCH entire company of our tanks was spotted by russian razvedka troops hiding in the woods and blown apart by ATGMs from helicopter gunships", what we're going to see is what they want us to see and it's poor frighened young Russians peeing their pants, getting lost generally bumbling into trouble, and being abandoned by their commanders, to try and recreate those First Chechen War vibes that are still a scar on Russian memories. A lot of the bigger propoganda has been easy to deboonk (where are the crash sites of these planes you are claiming? why are russian troops clearly at the airport you claim to have retaken? why is this island you claim heroically resisted to the last strangely pristine and intact and not a smoking crater?) but "we caught the saboteur!!!" style small scale stuff is both harder to confirm and not really worth the effort.
What we can note is that they haven't made much progress in the north west, have made decent progress towards Kiev, and seem to have broken out in the South from Crimea though that has slowed down. What we don't know is what their plan is and to what extent what we're seeing aligns with it, whether they were aiming for speedy advance, whether they are just trying to feint and present a threat to get Ukranian formations to move position so they can be spotted and bombarded/drawn away from where a real attack is/etc. The big operating fact for me is that the Russians have a lot of forces uncommitted that haven't crossed the border yet, and they have plenty of stand off missile they haven't used. The expected shock and awe bombardment and blitzkrieg hasn't happened. A lot of Western commentary is that they are behind schedule but that might be according to the operational plan the West was expecting. It seems the Russian plan is not what people expect so it's hard to judge to what extent they are succeeding.
But having soldiers at the edge of your enemies capital city can't really be called a failure, so they're definitely not losing. And they have made good progress without committing most of their forces, so they are probably doing OK.
Also, having half their forces uncommitted means there's plenty of scope for them to adjust the plan if what they had isn't working as hoped.