You have a bag of misinformation. That's all.
“Reliable enough for me to stock up successfully weeks before lockdown”, you mean?
This leads to two options:
1. They don't have any communications at all and the analog we capture is 'fake'
2. They are using the analog unencrypted channels we can all listen to
In fantasyland there is a third option: they have wireless communication that isn't detectable at all and doesn't use devices we can take photos of.
- Extreme wide spectrum frequency hopping. Hard to distinguish from the noise floor.
- Steganographic encrypted channel over fake unencrypted channel.
If course when in doubt, assuming stupidity is the safe bet.
But Hanlon's razor applies, and indeed, it is more likely incompetence.
Instead we have a clown show media that has already spent the last decade or two, disgracing itself repeatedly, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria to Libya to China to Russia unable to make any trustworthy context of current events.
Even if our own military was making this claim, that is not automatically trustworthy either. It's likely propaganda, just as the WMDs were. You really do not know.
So when you hear reports of a feckless Russian military completely unable to tell which way is North or unable to drop bombs without Google Maps access, and your first response is not skepticism, you aren't paying attention.
Meanwhile, even if you had direct feeds of their comms, do you know which comms are headfakes and which ones are real? Don't be foolish. Russia is one of the most successful nations in military history. We probably would not have won World War 2 without them. You probably do not have them figured out from your Twitter or TikTok feed.
With all that in mind, Ukraine needs every possible win it can get on the PR front. Kindergarten bombed? Kharkiv city center shelled indiscriminately? Video of random civilians on a road being obliterated by a missile? They need to tell everyone all of that, so that Ukrainians keep on fighting, and so the world keeps supporting them so there's weapons to fight with. National legends, feel good stories about superhuman successes by legendary men better than us is classic. If they exaggerate or invent some feel good/positive things, it doesn't matter. They're at a war they cannot win on military terms. The ends ( surviving) justifies the means.
You either have wireless communication or you don't, and you can detect the presence and absence of it using a software defined radio.
Perhaps you were responding to someone else.
There's a lot of recorded communication.