Ukraine’s crisis in 2022 through the lens of game theory

In this paper, I study Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine using game theory. I analyze different scenarios of the war based on three different realistic strategies that can be chosen by Russia, and three different realistic strategies that can be chosen by the West, leading to a simultaneous-move 3x3 non-cooperative game between these two players. In addition, I model both players with two different potential types: the West can be either approachable or aggressive, and Russia can be militant or insecure. While the available strategies of the players do not change, the type of a player determines the preferences over the available fixed strategies. Therefore, I model this situation as four different non-cooperative games depending on the players' types, and solve all four games by finding their Nash equilibria. In the second part of the paper, I include Ukraine as a third player who can affect the result of the war. The goal is to predict the possible future outcome of the ongoing war and to gain a better insight into the world’s future economic and political status