Thermodynamics and transport properties of Yang-Mills theory ill be discussed within a model consisting of soft stochastic background fields and hard gluonic fluctuations. In the confinement phase of such a model, the string in the static quark-antiquark pair can form a gluonic chain, which describes 2-nd and weak 1-st order phase transitions in the SU(2) and SU(3) cases, respectively. At temperatures close to the critical one in the deconfinement phase, Nonperturbative spatial self-interactions of gluonic fluctuations, as well as their interactions with the temporal stochastic fields through the Polyakov loop, are primarily important to describe the lattice-simulated pressure and interaction measure of the SU(3) gluon plasma. For a parton traversing the plasma, the model yields its radiative energy loss through Landau damping of soft gluons by the hard ones.
