Amateurs according to the popular narration in most media, which look only on Kiev and surrounding area. And Kharkiv but there only from the point of view of bombs hitting urban areas. No one practivally made any analysis about rest of the country or pays any attention there, which is paradox. All narration centers on Russians being incapable of taking metropolis of several millions, prepared for high intensity urban warfare from march, literally, while advancing through province sized mass of choke points and supplied through only one route.
We have here a high intensity modern war in severely constrained geographical enviroment, which also was started with minimal preparation time on the basis of forced entry principle.
That is why Rufus and many other people cannot understand what they are seeing in the TV, especially after two decades of 0-1 humanitarian interventions, peacekeeping and police actions agianst people who have had no capability of defending themselves.
Ukrainians have ELINT and satellite reconaissance in near real time provided by EU and USA and modern anti-tank weapons and MANPADS, used by trained armed forces with concrete doctrine in specific operational enviroment, that's why Russians did not just rolled over them. Despite that, take a not what is being said in the TV and what is not but was mentioned in the first two days. That some talking heads who do not have any knowledge about reading maps, geostrategy or operational planning with certainty are trying to draw conclusions from such great victories like pasting patrol on ATVs in the middle of the forrest or tank falling into river, while not noticing that Ukrainina Air Forces are basically not existing in the news, nor 'mechs or armor or fact that up until recently Russian troops basically were literally dicking with local population not knowing what to do with some unarmed mob blocking the street or letting them taking videos at their leisure, for example.
Spike in civilian causalities appeared when Russians have approached the prepared for defense urban areas, mainly Kharkiv and it's surrounding area, which are the literal bastion of the Northern Ukraine blocking movement southward, and given that Ukrainians have taken classes from Ludendorf, Goebbels and Swedes, and given the geography, you basically have to hack your way through smaller or larger fortified villages and towns and surrounding areas turned into killboxes with minefields, preplanned artillery and territorials and national gurad kill teams with Javelins and N-LAWs.
As we see from 2-3 days, Russians have gain enough ground to conduct enough operational deployment into the front, so they are no longer bottlenecked ,especially on the Kiev front, and gradually hack their way around main strong points (ie. cities), encircling them and reducing them with artillery and since two days more frequent use of airstrikes, while pushing forward and bringing up consolidating their gains with the use of Rosgvardia and Wagner Group. Russians control the pace of the conflict and they will paste any resistance with time, example is Briańsk, which have fallen in day 4 and Kherson that after three battles was finnaly taken yesterday. Resistance is already breaking as Russians bring gradually more and more of firepower into the combat zone and airstrikes become more and more frequent as supply situation is improving and Russians are breaking out of initial operational bottlenecks.
Also take note that they stopped dicking with passive civilian resistance, ie. now there are mass taking of cellphones and other streaming capable equipement and last time mass of people came on the road to try to block passage of Russian column, said group have been introduced into the live grenade.
Most likely we will see creation of filtration camps as they start combing local population from partisans, SOFs and stay behinds.
It's a war, not police action.