“42 million inhabitants, 42 million resistance fighters”, explains Colonel Peer de Jong

“We have rarely seen a country win against another when the population of the latter is hostile to it”, recalls Colonel (ER) Peer de Jong, former aide-de-camp to Presidents François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, guest of franceinfo on Wednesday August 17, about the war in Ukraine. While the Ukrainians managed to strike the Russian air base in Saki, in the heart of Crimea and 210 kilometers from the front, the vice-president of the Themiis institute, which specializes in international security, explains that the Ukrainian resistance has beautiful days ahead of her: “In this kind of fight, Ukraine is 42 million inhabitants, so 42 million resistance fighters.”

The specialist notes that “the Ukrainians use the train and their means tremendously to slow down the progression and the motivation of the Russians”.

“The Ukrainians are showing the world and Moscow what a Russian-occupied Ukraine can be: a mini-Afghanistan with constant attacks.”

Peer de Jong, retired colonel, vice-president of the Themiis institute

at franceinfo

This guerrilla technique, “destabilizing” for the Russians and “complicated” for the mind of Vladimir Putin, a lover of “conventional warfare, line against line”, fact that there is “little chance that the Ukrainians will not be able to oust the Russians in this fight.”

President Vladimir Putin “thought the country would fall like a ripe fruit, and it’s not like that”according to Peer de Jong, convinced that the Russian offensive is bogged down in Ukraine and that kyiv “doesn’t have enough men” to carry out a conventional counter-offensive.

Since the launch of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 and until mid-July, more than 15,000 soldiers have lost their lives in the fighting on each side, more than 5,000 Ukrainian civilians have died according to the High Office of the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights.