Millions of Ukrainians Vote on Independence : Soviet Union: Sweeping approval is expected, despite Moscow’s grim warnings. Ballots will be counted today.

With the Soviet Union’s fate hanging in the balance, Ukrainians by the millions voted Sunday in a referendum on independence, though warned by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev that severing their centuries-old ties with Moscow would lead to disaster.

In villages and cities, citizens and their leaders have insisted on the Ukrainians’ historic right to statehood, and massive endorsement of independence is considered assured. To affirm their homeland’s new status, Ukrainians also elected their first president in seven decades.

“When I took the ballot in my hands, I felt responsible not only for myself, but for my children and grandchildren,” said Olexander Kovtunenko, 23, a lanky business student who voted in Kiev’s dreary high-rise suburb of Novo Biliche.

“Until today, my ancestors, my grandfather, my father and myself were all under Moscow’s thumb. We are returning to civilization.”

Leonid M. Kravchuk, the Parliament chairman who was favored to beat out five other candidates for the presidency, said independence is inevitable. “The movement of millions of people in the Ukraine cannot be stopped,” he told reporters while voting in Kiev.

Counting of the ballots was suspended Sunday evening, and preliminary results are not expected before this afternoon. But Kravchuk said that one special category of absentee voters, Ukrainian sailors at sea, voted 92% in favor of independence.

On the eve of the election, both Gorbachev and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin had urged Ukrainians to remain united with the Russian Federation in a new confederation.

“I cannot imagine the union without the Ukraine,” Yeltsin said, adding that he agrees with Gorbachev that everything must be done to persuade the republic to remain in a reconstituted Soviet Union.

Kravchuk, a former high Communist Party official, said he was “personally insulted” by Yeltsin’s remarks on the Ukraine, but he added that authorities in Moscow cannot keep his people from freedom.

“What steps can they take against an entire nation?” Kravchuk asked. He said he is certain that President Bush, a “real democrat,” will extend U.S. recognition to the Ukraine after the referendum’s results are known.

Gorbachev, for his part, has declared that he would not regard even an overwhelming vote here for independence as a break with the Soviet Union but as a step toward forming the new union based on voluntary participation, according to an account from the Soviet news agency Tass of a 45-minute telephone conversation he had with President Bush.

“To push the processes in this direction (toward independence) would mean to move toward a catastrophe for the union, the Ukraine itself, Russia and Europe,” Gorbachev told Bush.

Turnout was nonetheless heavy, and by 4 p.m. election officials said that about three-quarters of the 37.5 million registered voters in the richest and most populous Soviet republic--after the Russian Federation--had cast ballots. Officials expected the final turnout to be at least 80%.

People were given a reddish slip of paper asking whether they approved of the Aug. 24 decision of the Parliament proclaiming “an independent Ukrainian state.”

In Washington, a White House spokesman said that the President plans to issue no statement on the election until the official results are in.

Last week, Administration officials said Washington intends to move “expeditiously” toward recognizing the Ukraine if, as expected, its voters endorse independence.

However, on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” Robert Strauss, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, said Washington does not plan to offer the Ukraine full diplomatic recognition until it has received reassurances in a number of areas.

“I think we have to get into issues of how the election was held, their commitment to human rights,” Strauss said. “What are we going to do about control of nuclear arms? What do we do about acknowledgement of past debt? And I could go on and on and list things.”

As a first step toward resolving those issues, the ambassador added, the United States “will acknowledge that millions of people have voted for freedom and for independence” and will send an envoy to Kiev.

Strauss also said that he believes that even if the Ukraine votes to become independent, some form of relationship among former Soviet republics will endure. “I personally think that six months, 12 months from now, there will be a union,” Strauss said, but he added: “It will be an entirely different union from what you’ve seen in the past.”

In the damp cold of an early December morning, Ivan Kuprichik, 61, a resident of Makovyshche, population 936, paused outside the polling station in the flat farmland west of Kiev and explained why he voted tak --yes.

“I did not have a happy life; I lived in poverty, naked and barefoot,” said the grizzled, red-nosed peasant, who had already had a few shots of vodka to warm himself up. “The Ukraine was robbed. This was a colony of Russia.”

In Motyzhin, on the road westward to Lvov, some of the 1,860 residents came to vote on horse-drawn wagons. Mykola Holik, a teamster with a steel-toothed grin, said he voted for independence. A trio of elderly women born and raised in a hamlet said they, too, had led sad lives under Soviet rule.

“We saw everything: the war, the famine. We remember how they caught children and ate them,” said the most talkative, Melaniya Petryna, whose hair was wrapped in a green kerchief. She was born in 1919 and said she may die before things really change. “Maybe our grandchildren will live better,” she said.

The Ukrainian leadership, dominated by the republic’s Communist Party machine until the failed August putsch against Gorbachev, threw itself furiously behind the independence drive when it became clear that the Soviet empire was collapsing and anti-Communists such as Yeltsin were in control in Moscow.

There was no real republic-wide debate on pluses and minuses of secession. State-run television newscasts included videotaped commercials arguing that only statehood would give true prosperity to the Ukraine, which roughly accounts for a fifth of Soviet farm and factory output.

“I am 55. I was born here, grew up here and know everything,” Vladislav Gorban, a doctor with piercing brown eyes, said in Kiev. “I totally understand that Kravchuk is a typical Communist chameleon, and how he and the other Communists are using this independence business as a way to remain in power. If he needed to be a Muslim, he would become one. If he had to be a Jew, he would become one.”

Casting his ballot at Kiev’s Polling Station No. 8 in the lobby of the headquarters of the Ukrainian State Committee on Light Industry, the doctor voted for Kravchuk’s chief opponent, Lvov regional governor Vyacheslav Chornovil, who spent a decade and a half in prison and exile for espousing nationalist causes.

If, despite his high showing in the most recent opinion polls, Kravchuk does not receive more than 50% of Sunday’s vote, a runoff between the two top vote-getters will be held Dec. 15.

The other candidates are physicist and progressive member of Parliament Ihor Yukhnovsky; Vladimir Griniev, an ethnic Russian from the eastern Ukraine; Leopold Taburiansky, a Dnepropetrovsk entrepreneur who makes exercise machines and wheelchairs, and Levko Lukyanenko, a nationalist who served 27 years in labor camps and once was supposed to be shot for pushing secession from the Soviet Union.

Times staff writer Karen Tumulty, in Washington, and special correspondent Mary Mycio, in Kiev, contributed to this report.