3 Baltic Leaders Ask Gorbachev for Early Talks : Secession: They press independence drive. Lithuania prepares to circumvent the Kremlin’s economic blockade by bringing in oil by sea.

The leaders of the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, presenting a united front, called upon Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Sunday for early talks on independence.

Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis said that he and Latvian President Anatolijs Gorbunovs and Arnold Ruutel, the president of Estonia, sent a telegram to Gorbachev in Moscow requesting a meeting to discuss their secession from the Soviet Union. They left it to Gorbachev to set the time and place.

“Moscow considers that the signature of a peace treaty (with Germany) will constitute the resolution of World War II,” Landsbergis said, referring to the negotiations now under way on German reunification. “We say that the war will not be resolved as long as the Baltic problem is not solved.”

The Baltic leaders, who met over the weekend in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, believe that Gorbachev may still be swayed from his insistence that any of the 15 Soviet republics wanting to secede must follow complex procedures laid down by new legislation, including a referendum and the approval of the national Congress of People’s Deputies.

“One of the points of the (Tallinn) meeting has been the signature of an accord of coordination in foreign policy, and we have already accomplished this first step,” Landsbergis told journalists.

In Tallinn, Estonian Foreign Minister Lennart Meri said the Baltic states place considerable hope in this joint appeal to Gorbachev.

“We hope that he will understand our problem and the goodwill that the people of the Baltic states have for his policy of democratization,” Meri said.

Lithuania, meanwhile, prepared to bring in oil by sea to circumvent the Kremlin’s crippling economic blockade, which halted oil shipments nearly a month ago and sharply reduced the flow of natural gas. Painfully short of gasoline and other petroleum products, Lithuania has only 10 days of reserves, according to officials here.

To establish an alternative source of oil, sympathetic Lithuanian emigres purchased 80,000 tons of crude for about $1.4 million and are shipping it aboard an unidentified tanker to the Baltic Sea port of Klaipeda, Industry Minister Rimvidas Jacinevicius told state-run Lithuanian television Sunday.

Officials of the separatist republic’s government refused to elaborate on the reported shipment, which would constitute Lithuania’s most daring attempt to run the blockade imposed a month ago by Gorbachev.

“We do not have any such information officially,” Valdemaras Katkus, Lithuania’s deputy foreign minister, said when asked about Jacinevicius’ statement.

The chief of the government information center, Paulius Pauparas, while declining to comment, noted that Klaipeda is being converted to receive shipments of crude oil from overseas. The port once handled petroleum products from a nearby refinery now closed by the Kremlin’s blockade.

Violetta Klimaite, a journalist with the pro-independence Sajudis Information Agency, said Klaipeda port authorities predicted that the conversion work would be completed Tuesday, in time to receive the first shipment.

However, Eduardas Potasinskas, an editor at Lithuanian Television, said the Soviet military commander in Klaipeda had recently been replaced, an action that he speculated might herald reinforced security and the closing of the port to commercial traffic.

Lithuania has gone farther and faster than its neighbors in reasserting the independence that all three Baltic states lost in 1940, when the Soviet Union, under Josef Stalin, swallowed them in a deal with Nazi Germany.

The central government’s response to laws passed by Landsbergis’ government has been to impose mounting economic sanctions, including a cutoff in crude oil supplies as well as drastic reductions in the shipment of natural gas.

The embargo has transformed the daily lives of Lithuanian managers, workers, homemakers and drivers into an economic nightmare.

Butchers in one Vilnius neighborhood, for example, reported that the price of pork has now risen to about $7.30 a pound at official exchange rates.

Residents said staples are becoming scarce, possibly because of panic buying. Vilnius’ store shelves, however, remain reasonably full by Soviet standards.

And residents remain defiant. “Surviving the blockade will be better than 50 years of Soviet occupation--we will hold fast,” said Audrone Zickute, a mother in her early 30s, as she wheeled her year-old son from one downtown shop to another in search of groceries.

Strapped for gasoline since Moscow shut off crude oil to the refinery near Klaipeda, Vilnius drivers are paying the equivalent of up to $9 a gallon, more than three times the pre-blockade price.

Weekend traffic on the cobbled streets of this green and hilly city of 580,000 has been cut to a virtual trickle, and a one-time source of supply, a gas station in the village of Oshmyany in Soviet Byelorussia, about 35 miles east of here, is no longer available. Police now guard the Oshmyany pumps to ensure that no fuel is sold to cars bearing Lithuanian license plates.

Landsbergis said in Tallinn on Saturday that more than 20,000 Lithuanians are now out of work--and that perhaps 300,000 could be soon because of the blockade.

Latvia and Estonia, which have chosen more gradual paths to the restoration of independence, have agreed as a result of the weekend meeting to form a committee with Lithuania to see what common action can be taken against the Soviet economic sanctions.

Leaders in the other republics fear that Moscow’s economic blockade might soon be extended to them.

But Estonians estimate that the three republics together are about 70% self-sufficient in trade and goods and would be able to coordinate their economies to minimize shortages of oil and other raw materials while concentrating resources on new enterprises.

Lithuanian Prime Minister Kazimiera Prunskiene returned Sunday afternoon from an international search for aid and diplomatic support that took her from a meeting with President Bush at the White House to talks with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, French President Francois Mitterrand and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

“This is de facto recognition,” Prunskiene told a press conference in Moscow.

In Vilnius, Prunskiene told people who met her with flowers and song at the airport that she had been promised some 100,000 tons of oil as “a present” by a Western firm. When asked who had made the gift, she replied, “That’s a company secret.”