MOSCOW, July 12./TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin is confident that millions of people in Ukraine are in favor of seeing a thaw in relations between Moscow and Kiev, but they are "not allowed to raise their heads".

"There is no place for sovereign Ukraine in the ‘anti-Russia’ project, and neither for the political forces that are trying to defend its real independence," the president said in his article On the Historical Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians, published on the Kremlin website on Monday.

According to him, "those, who talk about reconciliation in the Ukrainian society, about a dialogue, about finding a way out of the deadlock, are labeled as ‘pro-Russian agents’". "The ‘anti-Russia’ project is simply inadmissible for many in Ukraine. And there are millions of such people. But they are not allowed to raise their heads. They have been practically stripped of all legal means to defend their point of view," Putin stressed.

"They are intimidated, driven to the underground. They are not only persecuted, but are even killed for their convictions, for the words they say, for openly voicing their positions," he stressed. "The killers go unpunished as a rule," Putin noted.

"Only those who hate Russia" are now called ‘true’ patriots of Ukraine, the president stressed. Moreover, it seems that there are plans to build the entire Ukrainian statehood around this idea only. "Hatred and animosity is a rather fragile basis for a sovereignty, fraught with many serious risks and grave consequences, which has been repeatedly proved by world history," he went on to say.

According to Putin, millions of Ukrainian citizens have rejected the ‘anti-Russia’ project, with residents of Crimea and Sevastopol making their historic choice in favor of Russia. Meanwhile, residents of Donbass first sought to defend their position peacefully, but, following threats of ethnic cleansing and the use of military force against them, they had to take up arms in order to protect their homes, language and their lives.

The followers of Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera have not abandoned their plans to commit pogroms in Crimea and Donbass, but they will not get the chance, President Vladimir Putin said in the article.

"Did they have any other choice - after the pogroms that rocked the cities of Ukraine, after the horrors of the May 2, 2014, tragedy in Odessa, where Ukrainian neo-Nazis burned people alive, staging a new Khatyn massacre?" Putin asked.

"The followers of Bandera were ready to commit the same outrage in Crimea, in Sevastopol, in Donetsk and Lugansk. Even now, they have not abandoned such plans. They are biding their time. But they won’t see this happen," Putin said.