Ukraine Inaugurates Its New President : Independence: Kravchuk, leader of new nation, pledges not to return to the Soviet camp.

Leonid Kravchuk, a former Communist apparatchik, swore himself in as president of an independent Ukraine on Thursday and pledged to live up to his campaign promise not to lead his nation back into the Soviet camp.

At an emotion-filled special session, Parliament officially accepted the results of last Sunday’s referendum on secession from the Soviet Union, approved by more than 90%.

“A European state has appeared on the map, and its name is Ukraine,” declared Ivan Plyushch, the deputy Speaker, touching off thunderous applause.

In Moscow, Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin admitted that he now holds little hope that Ukraine will sign the treaty for a reconstituted union, a pact that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has tried ever more desperately to forge over recent months.

Still, Yeltsin said, he “cannot imagine a union” without Ukraine, and if Kravchuk refuses point-blank to join the revamped confederation, “we will have to look at other variants” on the proposed treaty.

In a series of urgent consultations to clarify Ukraine’s position and the Russian Federation’s possible next moves, Yeltsin and Kravchuk are to meet in Minsk on Saturday at a Slavic summit also attended by Belarus President Stanislau Shushkevich. On Monday, the three Slavic presidents are to convene again in the Kremlin, joined by Gorbachev and Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

At Thursday’s ceremony formalizing Ukrainian independence, the 450-member Parliament stood as one as a Kiev folk choir, dressed in red-and-white embroidered peasant costumes, sang the national anthem. Some deputies wept as they listened to the song, a poignant reminder of the centuries-old travail of this Slavic people.

Kravchuk, 57, winner in Sunday’s presidential election, had been the chairman of Parliament, the highest office in this land until the creation of an executive presidency. So for protocol reasons, he administered the oath of office to himself.

Beside him lay a great treasure of Ukrainian culture, the Peresopnitska Gospels, an illuminated, hand-written New Testament from the 16th Century in the Ukrainian language of the time.

The 75-minute ceremony was the apotheosis of Kravchuk’s political career, one of the most bizarre spawned by the recent years of turmoil in the Soviet Union. Two years ago, the short, silver-haired native of western Ukraine, then a top figure in the officially atheist and pro-Moscow Communist Party, was leading a smear campaign against advocates of Ukrainian independence.

But after the August coup and the virtual collapse of the central organs of Soviet power, Kravchuk abandoned his vague talk of seeking Ukrainian “sovereignty” and went into high gear to promote independence.

Despite an urgent plea from Gorbachev earlier this week, Kravchuk said that as Ukraine’s first president in seven decades, he will not adhere to the Soviet president’s proposed Union Treaty.

But Kravchuk indicated that he does seek close two-way ties with Yeltsin. “An alliance with Russia is not like (Gorbachev’s) Union of Sovereign States, but an alliance of two great states,” he said.

Kravchuk said his first priority will be economic reform.