You're reading: Poroshenko says Russia tries to ‘steal’ Ukrainian historical figures for its history

President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko believes that Russia uses all methods to impede Ukraine on its way to Europe.

“The Kremlin, stricken with chronic Ukrainophobia, was playing mean tricks on us. It used all available resources: money, propaganda, lies, intrigues, intelligence structures, influence groups. Anti-European populist forces inside the European Union, who used bureaucratic clues and created new ones, played to it,” he said in his address on the occasion of the ratification of the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement by the Parliament of the Netherlands.

According to him, all this was done for the sole purpose of “making it impossible to ratify the Agreement, bury it and accordingly stop the course of Ukraine to reunite with the European family.”

“It is a reunion, as we were part of it in the history. By the way, since the time of the ancient Ukrainian prince Yaroslav the Wise and his daughter Anna Yaroslavna of Kyiv, whom, literally yesterday, Putin tried to steal for Russia’s history in front of Europe,” the president said.