3 Nations Press for End to Warsaw Pact : East Europe: Poles, Czechs and Hungarians say that they will act unilaterally if meeting to break up defense bloc is not set by end of February.

Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary want the final meeting of the Warsaw Pact set by the end of February or they will take steps to dissolve the obsolete defense bloc without the Soviet Union’s involvement, foreign ministers of the three East European states warned Monday.

Although the reform-minded nations of the former Communist bloc made clear that they will not wait forever to break their military ties to Moscow, the foreign ministers took an otherwise cautious approach to recent events in the Soviet Union.

All three states swiftly condemned the Red Army action in Lithuania more than a week ago, when 13 nationalist demonstrators and a soldier were killed.

But they were hesitant to characterize the weekend crackdown in Soviet Latvia as an indication that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has swung further away from his flagging reform course or that the army is out of his control.

“We don’t know everything. The picture is not clear,” Poland’s foreign minister, Krzysztof Skubiszewski, told journalists when asked whether he thinks Gorbachev is still in command.

The foreign ministers played down the implications for their own states of the harder Soviet line, suggesting that Moscow is no longer in any position to inflict its will on other sovereign countries.

Skubiszewski and his counterparts, Foreign Ministers Jiri Dienstbier of Czechoslovakia and Geza Jeszenszky of Hungary, said that the continued presence of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe poses little threat because their numbers are few and they lack support from other armies of the disintegrating Warsaw Pact.

Czechoslovak officials hinted last week that they might press for an accelerated dissolution of the military bloc because of the Baltic crisis. But Dienstbier denied that Prague wants to change the timetable for withdrawing Soviet soldiers and said the Warsaw Pact is effectively defunct in any case.

The seven-nation alliance forged in 1955 to counter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization already has lost East Germany to the West through German unification, and none of the other East European members will take part in joint maneuvers or planning other than to oversee the Soviet soldiers’ departure.

All remaining Soviet troops must be out of Hungary and Czechoslovakia by the end of June, but Poland has yet to conclude a withdrawal agreement with Moscow.

Although the foreign ministers sought to cool reaction to repression in the Baltic, they made clear that they are impatient for the decisive Warsaw Pact summit meeting that Gorbachev has delayed repeatedly since November.

“We wish to convene the political advisory committee by the end of February or, at the latest, in early March,” Dienstbier said. “If this is not convenient (for Moscow), we will have to discuss the future steps with our colleagues” in Eastern Europe.

The foreign ministers also discussed regional cooperation on trade, tourism and military strategy; their traditional networks have collapsed with the fall of communism throughout the region.