The YouTube channels that I find most informative are not the ones that get featured on these pages most often. There are a number of reasons for that but the main reason is that most of the channels that I find to be “best” are only best if you already have a general knowledge of the conflict. Since I don’t want to presume that level of knowledge, I generally default to videos that presume less knowledge. That said, these are my three favorite because I feel they do the most to educate me and the reasons why.

Best at Military Detail: Reporting from Ukraine

Reporting from Ukraine is the best at explaining the military logic of a situation with details not found on other channels. Sometimes the details are negative facts for Ukraine that other Pro-Ukrainian channels gloss over and Pro-Russian channels hype to the skies. Other times the details he provides are simple military facts that other channels just don’t think are important enough to report. He also makes a virtue of being short and to the point. The only downside is he does not embedded a lot of video so a lot of times it helps to have seen other channels if you want visual evidence of what he is talking about. But this is a small price to pay for his concise detailed overview of what is happening. If you want to see the difference for yourself, watch the video he made today on the fall of Lyman.

Now watch this one by a much more popular channel. Or this one from another channel that is more popular.

Best at Video Analysis: Suchomimus

There are a lot of sites who love to bring you the latest cool video out of Ukraine. But most of the time, the videos do little to expand your understanding of how things are going even if they are being explained to you by presenter. Suchomimus is different. If he posts a video there are good odds that you are going to learn something from it. The most important thing he does is geo-locate what is going on so you have a sense of what that brief clip is showing you about the wider war. The main downside is that Suchomimus does not do daily updates of how the wider war is going nor does he typically do big picture videos. For that reason, you need to have a good general knowledge of the war to get much out of his videos. Here is an example of Suchomimus giving the goods on a video a lot of other sites were already talking about…

And here is how these videos are all too typically presented.

Best Long Form Analysis: Perun

If you have a high level on interest in the Ukraine conflict and fancy yourself pretty well informed, then you need to watch Perun’s videos. The odds are very high that Perun has dug up data that you have not come across and possible he will even put it into a context that you have not considered. The downside is that his videos generally run for an hour or more so he is certainly someone you want to watch on double speed while exercising if at all possible. Here is his video on the Russian Mobilization.

I am not aware of anyone like Perun when it comes to the war in Ukraine so I can’t really compare him to anyone else. Probably for the best. There are only so many hour long videos that can be fit into a work out routine even on double speed.