I have pondered what the Russian strategic goals for this war are and while I can guess something like taking everything east of the Dnieper it is just a guess. They could be trying to attrition Ukraine down over years until Ukraine is too weak to give meaningful resistance and then mobilize and take everything Russia has interest in like Odessa and Transnistria. Russia could also be just trying to take the Donbas and the oblasts they held the referendums on and then have a ceasefire that doesn't settle anything. Russia could also be trying to accomplish some kind of negotiated settlement. Personally I don't think Putin would sign off on Minsk 3 given how big a fuckup Minsk 2 was. Russia seems to be maintaining some strategic ambiguity. This means the enemy has difficulty planning against you in the long term because they don't know what you are after. But that means it is hard to know when the war will end and why it will end.
You're right that Russia is - quite justifiably - playing its cards close to its chest but I believe their strategic goals have changed. I think to begin with they really did mainly want NATO to back off and Ukraine to be neutral and would have accepted something along those lines. I even believe that a real part of Russia's motives may even have been to protect ethnic Russians from the abuses of the Kiev government following the coup in 2014. I don't think at the outset it was actually their goal to seize everything East of the Dnieper and I'm still not certain they'd actually hold out for that if negotiations were on the table.
Case in point the initial strike at Kiev. This was a small clusterfuck and it doesn't seem likely to me that they would have held the city and I'm sure they know that better than I. It was part of an initial shock attack to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table. And it would have worked if Boris Johnson hadn't stuck his nose in things and promised Zelensky and his backers anything they needed to defeat Russia. (Or if Zelenksy and his backers hadn't stupidly believed Perfidious Albion). So their behaviour at the outset seemed very much more orientated around bringing Ukraine to the negotiating table and protecting the Russian areas of the Ukraine. Now? With how far things have gone - the US destroying their pipelines, Western govts. handing over a shocking amount of weapons and with boots on the ground and the NATO playing a game of "nuh-uh, they took their uniforms off, not us" with Russia, I think even Putin (who would love peace with the West) has recognized that the only lasting peace will be one of new borders.
I've said this before, but I genuine;y do not think a false flag would work out how they hope it would. Zoomers, for all their faults, are not joining the military and I have to assume that people who are already in are probbaly planning to get out sooner than later before a big war can break out. People have heard the horror stories about Iraq and Afghanistan and aren't as hopped up on Mountain Dew and Call of Duty as before enough to think they can make a difference. TikTok has won the propaganda war with teenagers and college kids.
A false flag at this point would be way too blatant.
I don't necessarily disagree with your assessment of the demographics (though I think it's easy to be misled by the high visibilty of the TikTok crowd - I've met plenty of current gen kids who are pretty normal and sorted). But I think you misunderstand how convincing a false flag has to be to be useful. You set the bar way too high. Nobody I knew really believed that Iraq had WMD and even if they did the view was that they were old, decaying maybe gas weapons, not some horrifying doomsday stuff. We all pretty much knew it was a lie. The purpose of the lies about Iraq's WMD were to (a) provide a legal basis for war so that those wanting it couldn't be held up by any legal issues and (b) to make the conversation about whether or not Iraq had WMD (something very hard to prove a negative) rather than whether or not Iraq had oil. Same principle was behind the more actual false flag (in that
use of WMD was claimed rather than merely possession) with Syria and that "gas attack" that the White Helmets got involved in.
There are some false flags that are effective in terms of the deceit. Sometimes. But a lot of the time their purpose is simply because the Prime Minister or the US president can't stand up before the people and say "we want their stuff". They have to say "we are defending against these terrible crimes." They know they're lying, foreign nations know they're lying and a lot of the domestic audience know they're lying. But it's easier to deflect opposition if you're making them say "this evidence has holes in it" than if that opposition is saying "it's monstrous to kill a million people so you can maintain hegemony and oil prices". And not least because
some of the people will choose to believe it because they support the govt. or think its opponents are evil so now you have your opponents debating and arguing with your adherents rather than having a clear path of argument to you. You wont get those adherents shutting down opposition if those adherents are only able to say "it's okay to steal billions of barrels of Syrian oil". Your adherents need you to give them something like "Assad is gassing his people".
So in summary and again, you're setting the bar way too high for how many people need to believe a false flag, for that false flag to be useful.
If NATO is about to actually go in to direct engagement in Ukraine, if the US leadership really decide they're okay with that, then you will see a false flag.
(EDIT: I mean a new false flag. Bucha was over a year ago, a false flag needs to be fresh in the people's minds).
