They could barely penetrate a Ukraine with its pants down

The rest of your comment is spot-on, but this isn’t a good assessment of the Russian invasion. They’re very clearly fighting a limited war (i.e., they don’t want to occupy the whole of Ukraine, they just don’t want a U.S. puppet and NATO member as a neighbor) and it’s possible-to-likely that their initial sprint to Kyiv was only withdrawn due to the early peace talks that the UK and US scuttled.