It is difficult to make an argument that Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a new form of war. Hitler's Nazi Party were using nearly all the same tactics nearly a century ago: endless lies, spurious legitimizations of territorial acquisition, indiscriminate use of rape and murder to terrorize and exterminate civilian populations, and the explicit targeting of civilian infrastructure. Equally, Stalin covered his genocides with plenty of lies that were swallowed whole by gullible naive westerners. All that has really changed is the speed with which these elements can be deployed: the Internet spreads lies at almost the speed of light, while modern vehicles help move people across the battlefield more rapidly than Napoleon could have dreamed of.

Moreover, game theory assumes semi-rational actors responding to the reality of events on the ground. Putin, like all dictators, is cut off from real-world information and as such his assessments and tactics are no overly influenced by facts but rather by his delusional thinking. This makes game theory much less useful - it's a totally different situation from the Cuban missile crisis, for example, because in that case both sides were dealing with factual information first, and ideologies second. With Putin, it's ideology first, and factual information a very distant last-place if it happens to feature at all.