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President George H.W. Bush and his “Chicken Kiev Speech”
Exactly 31 years ago, in August 1991, President H.W. Bush paid an official visit to Ukraine. During a speech to the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, he warned that he opposed Ukraine’s secession from the Soviet Union, calling the Ukrainians’ desire for independence “suicidal nationalism.”
This speech went down in history as the “chicken Kiev speech” and provoked a barrage of criticism both in the United States and around the world. Unlike Canada and Poland, which immediately recognized Ukrainian independence, the United States did so only on December 25, 1991, almost a month after the Ukrainian referendum of December 1.
August 1, 1991, U.S. President George W. Bush’s speech to the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, members of the Cabinet of Ministers, representatives of political parties and public organizations expressed the official view of the Soviet leadership and personally Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s hopes to preserve the USSR by signing a new union treaty were shared by the American president. It is very likely that the prospect of a rapid disintegration of the largest communist country in the world, which had the second largest nuclear capability after the United States, looked really frightening to President Bush.