GAME THEORY 101
Inside Ukraine's Victory Day Strike Plan
A professor explains why timing matters. With diagrams.
what it is.
William Spaniel is a political science professor at the University of Pittsburgh who runs the Game Theory 101 YouTube channel. This video unpacks Ukraine's strategy around Russia's annual May 9 Victory Day parade; what hitting (or not hitting) targets around that date signals strategically, and what Russia's response calculus looks like. Spaniel's whole thing is applying game theory and crisis bargaining models to actual wars in real time. He's been doing this with Ukraine since 2022 and is one of the few academics who's made the leap to YouTube without losing the rigor.
why i liked it.
Because once you start watching Spaniel, the news stops feeling random. He shows you the logic underneath strategic decisions, which is so much more useful than just being told what happened. The Victory Day video is a great example: he explains why the date of a strike is itself a message, not just the target. Also: he draws on a whiteboard, which I find weirdly soothing. His videos are how I actually learned to read a war map without crying.
what to take from it.
War is communication. Every decision in a conflict is a signal; to your enemy, to your allies, to your own population. Once you start asking "what is this trying to say?" instead of just "what happened?", current events open up. Subscribe to his channel; he updates often, and his back catalogue is basically a free IR seminar.
— xx, m