Ukraine Disavows Economic Union : Soviet plan: The republic’s leader delivers what may be a deathblow to proposal for a common market. The region votes on independence Dec. 1.

Ukrainian President Leonid M. Kravchuk, delivering what may prove to be a deathblow to plans for a Soviet common market, said Friday that the new economic union’s charter has already been breached by Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government and hence is void.

“The economic treaty is already dead,” Kravchuk declared in a speech setting out the domestic and foreign policy goals of a Ukraine that is expected to vote for full independence in a week.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Yeltsin and leaders of other Soviet republics last month implored the Ukraine to join their “collective effort” to build a new, much looser confederation from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian participation, they said, is indispensable.

Prime Minister Vitold P. Fokin signed the treaty on behalf of the Ukraine two weeks ago, incorporating the Soviet Union’s second-most-populous, second-richest republic into the new economic community; nine other republics, led by the powerful Russian Federation, had already signed.

But the pact, highly controversial here, must be ratified by the Ukrainian Parliament, many of whose deputies oppose it as a continuation of the Soviet Union with a different form and name.

“If we in the Ukraine don’t distance ourselves from the (Soviet) Union, we will die, not only economically and ethnically but also ecologically,” lawmaker Mikhailo Horyn, a leader of the Rukh pro-independence movement, said in an interview. “Our land is poisoned, we have huge, monstrous factories that work for the empire alone because they need steel, cast iron and abominable weapons.”

Kravchuk, the Parliament’s chairman, originally pushed for membership in the new economic community but saw his ratings for the Ukraine’s Dec. 1 presidential race drop after Fokin signed the accord. His statement Friday, disavowing the accord and blaming Yeltsin, may have been motivated by electoral tactics.

Addressing a meeting to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the birth of Mikhailo Hrushevsky, president of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic crushed by followers of Bolshevik revolutionary V. I. Lenin, Kravchuk charged that Yeltsin’s government has already violated the economic accord to which it committed itself only last month.

Russia, Kravchuk claimed, is enacting a program of sweeping reforms designed to create a market economy without first consulting other republics, as the treaty requires.

Ukrainians fear that prices in Russia, which will no longer be subsidized but will be freed from state controls and allowed to rise, will soon skyrocket and send millions of scavenging consumers into the Ukraine. The Ukraine is rich in food, jobs and potential for industrial and agricultural growth.

As the Dec. 1 election nears, Ukrainian participation in Soviet institutions has all but ceased as the Kiev government and the Kremlin alike wait to see who will be the Ukraine’s first popularly elected president, as well as the voters’ verdict in the accompanying referendum on independence.

While Kravchuk and the six other presidential candidates all favor independence, there are broad differences on how future relations with the Ukraine’s former Soviet partners should be structured and what powers, if any, a central government should have.

The Ukraine did not even send envoys to negotiate Gorbachev’s proposed Union Treaty for a political and defense confederation among the republics. That treaty is to be opened for signing Monday in Moscow. Similarly, the Ukraine was one of four Soviet republics that did not agree in Moscow this week with major industrial powers on responsibility for repaying the Soviet Union’s foreign debt.

Kravchuk’s foremost opponent, radical nationalist Vyacheslav Chornovil, accuses the former Communist Party official of campaigning in a way that would simply rake in as many votes as he can. Chornovil, chairman of the regional government in Lvov, opposes Ukrainian entry into any economic or political union based on the former Soviet Union, and instead wants bilateral accords to define the new relationship with its neighbors.

Times special correspondent Mary Mycio contributed to this report.