Ukrainian people not to ask Putin for any permits – Poroshenko

The Ukrainian people would not ask Russian President Vladimir Putin where to move and Moscow would not put forward its conditions to Ukraine and Europe, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said.

"We have convincingly proved that we will not ask Putin for any permits for the first time in Ukraine's existence. Only the Ukrainian people will determine where to go, and the Kremlin will not put forward its conditions to Ukraine and Europe in general," the president said at the meeting of the Regional Development Council in Lviv region on Saturday.

He said that in 2014, Putin counted on the weakness of Ukraine, "but he did not know the main thing – he did not know the Ukrainian people."

The Ukrainian president advised the Russian president to study the history and biography of one of the leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Stepan Bandera. "Let him thumb through the pages about Bandera, about the Ukrainian Insurgent Arm. There are answers to all our successes now. Let him learn them," said Poroshenko.

The president also recalled that the Ukrainians did not allow splitting their country and buried the multi-vector project.