Bush's position was criticised by Ukrainian nationalists. Ivan Drach, the chairman of Rukh, told journalists that "President Bush seems to have been hypnotized by Gorbachev" and complained that the U.S. President "has consistently snubbed the democratic movements in the republics".[9] Drach criticised the way that Bush had sided with the Soviet leader:
Bush came here in effect as a messenger for Gorbachev. In many ways, he sounded less radical than our own Communist politicians on the issue of state sovereignty for Ukraine. After all, they have to run for office here in Ukraine and he doesn't.[11]
Another nationalist politician, Stepan Pavluk, complained that "Bush does not understand that we are fighting against a totalitarian state." He commented that Bush "talks a lot about freedom, but for us, it is practically impossible to conceive of freedom without independence. We have to create our own customs service and currency in order to protect our economy from total collapse."[12] The speech also attracted criticism from nationalists elsewhere in the Soviet republics. The government of Georgia issued a statement declaring that "The heir of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and others arrives ... and carries on propaganda in favor of the Union Treaty. Why didn't he call on Kuwait to sign the Union Treaty with Iraq?"[13]
Bush's speech also attracted criticism at home for being out of touch, though he was hardly alone in that; only the previous year, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had declared that she could no more open an embassy in Kiev than she could in San Francisco.[14] The Boston Globe called it "Bush league in Kiev" in an editorial, criticising Bush for having "mired him[self] rather too deeply for comfort on one side of an internal national debate". The newspaper felt that Bush had been injudicious in his language, particularly using phrases such as "suicidal nationalism," "ethnic hatred" and "local despotism" that it felt "went too far".[15] On August 29, 1991, William Safire used his New York Times column to label it the "Chicken Kiev" speech.[16][17]
On February 8, 1992, The Economist said the speech was "the most flagrant example" of other nations failing to recognize the inevitability of Ukraine becoming an independent state.[18] A man in a chicken suit appeared at numerous events during Bush's 1992 re-election campaign. Bush commented on the speech in 2004, explaining that he meant the Ukrainians should not do "something stupid", and that if their "leaders hadn't acted smartly, there would have been a crackdown" from Moscow.[1] In 2005 Condoleezza Rice, responding to a question about the speech at a press conference, remarked that it was easy to see in hindsight what was wrong with the perspective of the speech, but that the peaceful breakup of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union was not so obvious in 1991.[19] The conservative Washington Examiner opined in 2011 that it "may have been the worst speech ever by an American chief executive".[20]
