Soviets Offered Aid but Stress Debt Relief : Economy: Rich nations unveil a package worth several billion dollars. An aide to Yeltsin says Moscow can’t meet its obligations.

The world’s richest industrialized nations, struggling to shore up the collapsing Soviet economy, on Tuesday offered Moscow an aid package worth several billion dollars, including new credits and a freeze on interest payments on its crushing foreign debt.

But Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin’s top economic adviser said that what the country needs most is a deferral of all payments--interest and principal--on the $84 billion it owes, because the government simply will not have the money due foreign lenders this year or next.

At a closed meeting between financial experts representing the Group of Seven nations and the 12 Soviet republics, the Western governments proposed a one-year moratorium on interest payments on the foreign debt as well as a $1-billion short-term loan, Moldovan Prime Minister Valeriu Muravsky said.

But Yegor Gaidar, the Russian Federation deputy prime minister and economist overseeing Yeltsin’s radical reforms told reporters that “what we really, urgently need . . . is debt rescheduling--(including) the problem of the payment of the principal of the debt.”

His statement amounted to an open confession that the Soviets are incapable of paying Western countries and banks the $84 billion that, according to his figures, it owes them--with $4.5 billion due by the year’s end, $16.5 billion in 1992 and $18.5 billion in 1993.

Even if the Soviet Union devoted all of its export earnings to debt repayment, Gaidar said, “It would be impossible to maintain the debt obligations.”

A Western finance official said that the full value of the aid that the seven industrial nations are proposing amounts to the equivalent of giving the Soviets a new $7-billion credit.

Despite the low probability that the Soviet foreign debt will be repaid as scheduled, Western finance officials have insisted over the last two days of meetings that the Soviet republics work out and commit themselves to a plan to take responsibility among themselves for the debt.

By Tuesday evening, at least eight of the 12 republics, including the Russian Federation, had consented to sign an agreement on joint debt repayment. The four holdouts were Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Ukraine and Uzbekistan. But officials said they expect that at least some of them will join later.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Vitold Fokin told reporters that his republic could not commit itself to a deal without knowing exactly what costs it would entail.

The slow progress in working out the agreement--even after all the republics indicated last month that they would sign it--illustrated the tedious, tortuous negotiations that now typify any attempt at forging an economic consensus among the 12 republics.

Gaidar said that, at this point, the republics are so concerned with their own affairs that none appears willing to contribute more than 1% of its gross national product to the central Soviet budget next year. “That is the political and social reality,” he said, and it means that the government will have to bring in “very, very sharp, very, very serious cuts in military expenditures.”

The defense burden--the percent of the country’s gross national product that goes to the military--could be halved next year, he said.

Any aid that the Group of Seven nations--Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States--will provide will go only to those republics that agree to sign the joint debt repayment agreement, officials said.

Gaidar refused to comment directly on the Group of Seven talks but said that the Western nations have made “some very serious proposals.”