Facing Up to the Nitty-Gritty of Independence : Ukraine: It voted for freedom. But setting up a country won’t be easy after decades of subservience to Moscow.

Cotton to make flags for the free Ukraine will have to come from someplace else. None is grown here.

To administer the world’s newest country, the government can muster a total of 8,900 Kiev-based civil servants. They now must take charge of everything from mail delivery to running nuclear power plants and a fledgling navy.

As a newly independent country, Ukraine naturally wants its own currency. But it will have to have it printed in Canada because the republic lacks the proper presses.

As such facts show, real independence for Ukraine was not created by last Sunday’s referendum on the issue. It may even take decades to establish. Sovereign for only a few years in this century, Ukraine’s special predicament is that it must build a modern state and a democratic, market-based society in one fell swoop.

“Ukraine is fulfilling two tasks simultaneously,” President Leonid M. Kravchuk said last week. “It is changing its form of life and forming its statehood.”

What other country, for example, has needed to instantly develop its own policy on nuclear weapons to reassure a jittery world? Or proclaim a military doctrine before it had a single soldier under arms?

“In the past, decisions were never made here--they were made in Moscow,” observed John P. Hewko, a Ukrainian-American lawyer who has been in Kiev since last June to help nudge the land of his ancestors onto the world stage. “This place was just an outpost. And their problem now is not that they have too many bureaucrats, it’s that they have too few.”

That is not to say Ukrainians will not be competent to run their own affairs. But for decades, their brightest and best have been snapped up by the Soviet system, and they have left their homeland. “Foreign relations, central banking--you name it, it was run by the Kremlin and not here,” Hewko said.

Some years ago, a group of nationalists complained that Ukrainian leaders were such puppets that they had to seek Kremlin approval to dig a pedestrian passage under this city’s bustling thoroughfare, the Kreshchatik.

On the international scene, because of the carnage it suffered in World War II, Ukraine was given its own seat in the United Nations when the organization was founded. But its diplomats only parroted the Soviet government line until recently. Now Ukraine wants to be a full-fledged member of the world community. But it is not yet sure how to pay for it.

When a Canadian philanthropist offered 200 acres for the residence of Ukraine’s ambassador in Ottawa, people here were very grateful. It meant a huge savings. Its lack of ready cash means Ukraine will have to use a “selective approach” in deciding where to open its embassies, Foreign Minister Anatoly Zlenko said.

Col. Gen. Konstantin Morozov, the new defense minister and an ethnic Russian, envisages a Ukrainian army of as many as 400,000. But for now, the entire staff of his ministry could fit in a Volga sedan.

It is in the economic realm that achieving anything like autonomy will be hardest for Ukraine.

In the grimy coal mines of the Donetsk Basin, for instance, digging has come to a halt in places. The Russians are no longer shipping timber needed to shore up new underground shafts.

Of course, no modern country is self-sufficient. But Ukraine’s special brand of dependence stems from its seven decades as a cog in the Soviet socialist machine. The government here says Ukraine produces 82% of the things it needs, but there is a catch: Only 20% of the goods have a “closed manufacturing cycle” within the republic. All others include components made somewhere else.

“Ukraine is ready to become independent. But today its economy isn’t,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Vitold P. Fokin cautioned last month.

According to the Economics and Life newspaper, Ukraine uses up to 460 million barrels of oil yearly but produces only 21 million.

The yawning gap between supply and demand is no surprise to people like Sasha Radchenko, 33. The Kievan with deep-set eyes is trying to work as a gypsy cabdriver but is having a hard time finding fuel for his battered, Russian-made Zhiguli sedan. “Gasoline? Yeltsin doesn’t seem to be giving us much,” he said, accusing Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin of trying to humble his homeland’s pretensions to independence.

If Russia starts demanding world-level prices for its oil, Ukrainians say they will shop for foreign suppliers or heed proposals from their Academy of Sciences and convert military industries to civilian efforts, cutting energy consumption in the process.

Economists and legislators have even developed a scheme to turn the Ukraine-Russia interlinkage to Ukraine’s advantage: demand right-of-way fees for the gas pipeline, electric power cables and railroads that cross its territory.

Kravchuk and Yeltsin, who signed a bilateral economic agreement last month, will be seeking pledges from each other that the document will be respected when they meet today in Minsk. Much of the Ukrainian economy’s performance in the short term rides on that document.

To prevent hordes of hungry shoppers from descending on Ukraine after prices are raised in Russia this month, a sort of parallel currency carrying the image of the legendary female founder of Kiev, Lybed, is being printed. It temporarily will be the only legal tender for food. Ukrainians will get part of their wages in the Lybed notes; visitors must purchase them at a disadvantageous rate, chopping the buying power of the masses of rubles floating around the Soviet Union.

Sometime in the first half of next year, Ukraine’s own currency, the hrivna, will be introduced. In microcosm, the bank notes show how Ukraine’s great ambitions clash with its limited possibilities since, at least initially, the hrivna will have to be printed at Canadian facilities.

Until its own currency is in circulation, Zlenko said, Ukraine cannot allow people from Russia and other neighboring areas to come at will and buy whatever they fancy. Tough controls are already in effect. Items like notebooks and socks can be bought only with ration chits that Ukrainians get at work. At Kiev’s rail station, customs officers check bags of outbound passengers; they seize candy, butter and other foods that, by law, must remain here for Ukrainian consumers.

Dealing with the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident poses the most daunting task for an independent Ukraine, and its leaders have already begun seeking massive assistance abroad.

Cleanup, medical care and housing for victims of the disaster will cost untold sums, one Parliament member said, at a time when the local economy is so battered that toothpaste has become a rarity in Kiev stores.

As the Ukraine exits the Soviet empire, the quality of medical care is so poor that every year, 8,000 children here die of heart defects, said Dr. Zenon Matkiwsky of Short Hills, N.J., president of the Children of Chernobyl Relief Fund. Raising standards to Western levels, he said, would save 80% of them.