The fact that this has clearly failed to happen indicates that the war is not going as planned.
For comparison, it took the US three weeks total from launching their invasion of Iraq to taking over Baghdad, despite there being approximately 5x more distance to cover and Iraq fielding an army twice as large as Ukraine.
That is somewhat of a fiasco for someone who is supposed to have deployed order of magnitude more soldiers, tanks and airplanes than their opponent, and claimed they will win in few days.
EDIT: thanks for the correction, got the cities mixed up.
You are probably thinking of Kherson (a much smaller city, population 300k, in southern Ukraine).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukrai...
The only way to spin a false narrative is thorough censorship and control of the internet and public media, and we just don't have that in the west. We do have high levels of surveillance, and a tiny amount of editorialising on social media compared to Russia and China, but not state censorship and suppression capable of obstructing public discourse.
Maybe we (and the Russians) actually underestimated the Ukrainians a lot more than overestimated Russians...
So it is both: Russians doing fat worse than expected and Ukrainians are doing much better than I feared they would do.
What makes you say they are unquestioning? There's a lot of evidence of Russian military incompetence, including that they are struggling against a much smaller, much less-funded and less-equipped military.
Easy: The war is still going on. There is a lot information that is indeed very unreliable, but undeniable Russia has not yet won the war. A thing that Putin himself said on Russian television could be easily done within two weeks. We are now way past that and there is no end in sight.
Now if we take that indicator of bad performance seriously we can wonder what got into the way of the Russians. And there are some suggestions like badly maintained vehicles, lack of logistics (fuel trucks), vehicles that are unable to drive offroad, bad morale, lack of airsupport and so on.
Now we can take all these theories and try the ones that fit the perceived reality most — not looking at individual instances but on trends — and the theories that fit that picture best win (for now).
The fact is, that Russian explainations don't square with what can be observed long term. Ukrainian explainations are propagandistic (and sometimes lies), but they fit what can be observed if you look onto the bigger arcs of development much better.