Bush Praises Union Treaty in Restive Ukraine | LA Times - 2 Aug 1991 |

KIEV, Soviet Union -- President Bush pointedly praised Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his Union Treaty on Thursday in the ancient city of Kiev, where surging Ukrainian nationalism could derail Gorbachev's ambitious plan to save the Soviet Union from disintegration.

Although Bush told the Ukrainian legislature that the United States would not try to choose between winners and losers in political competitions involving the republics and the central government in Moscow, he went on to praise the Union Treaty and cautioned against pursuing "the suicidal course of isolation."

Yet freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.

Bush delivered his not-entirely-welcome message first in an address to the legislature--the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic--and later at a luncheon set amid the baroque splendors of Mariinsky Palace, built in 1742 for the daughter of Czar Peter the Great and later used as a Bolshevik headquarters during the Russian Revolution.

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