This is actually a known tactics. I remember in the 90s thieves often did similar things like triggering an alarm on a parking lot every night. At first many people were alarmed and went down to check on their cars. But after a few false alarms nobody cared. It was then when they started to steal.

A lot of people have learned exactly the wrong lessons from the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Making people complacent with repeated false alarms is more likely the intended outcome than a failure.

When I was in school, one of the history teachers spent a lot of time describing how the Yom Kippur War started. I guess he thought it told something important about how things work in the real world. The lead up to the Russian invasion looked pretty much the same. An ordinary person could not have known if the invasion would actually start this time. But a reasonable person should have understood that if an invasion was about to start, that was what it would likely look like.

> A lot of people have learned exactly the wrong lessons from the Boy Who Cried Wolf

Never tell the same lie twice?

Or https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/habit

For start Russia invaded Ukraine and continued war in eastern regions.

Russian invasion was not imminent, it was ongoing.

And for full scale invasion: there were a clear signs of it before it happened.