U.S. Focus Shifts to New Strongmen : Foreign policy: Soviet breakup forces the White House to seek out the emerging seats of power.

Only a few months ago--it seems like an age--President Bush was hard at work with a seemingly reliable partner in the quest for reform in the Soviet Union and a new world order around the globe. His partner’s name was Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Then came Moscow’s abortive coup last August, and the Bush Administration was forced to make a place in its thinking for the rough-hewn president of the Russian republic, Boris N. Yeltsin.

Now the avalanche of changes sweeping across what U.S. officials have ruefully taken to calling “the former Soviet Union” is forcing the White House once again to revise its strategy, this time to embrace new strongmen emerging from the ashes of disintegration--unfamiliar figures such as Ukraine’s Leonid M. Kravchuk and Nursultan A. Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.

“We’re moving very fast,” one State Department official said. “The vote in the Ukraine may not have been the end of the Soviet Union, but it was definitely the end of Gorbachev as a central figure.”

Bush and many of his senior advisers aren’t quite so ready to count Gorbachev out. Bush was reportedly taken aback last week when the Soviet leader objected to his offer of recognition to Ukraine only a day after the secessionist republic’s referendum on independence.

But while vowing to continue working with Gorbachev, the President said his focus is on working with whoever holds real power in the increasingly independent Soviet republics.

“This is all in the throes of evolution now,” Bush told reporters last week. “. . . You see an overwhelming vote for independence on the part of Ukraine. You see the reforms going forward in Russia. You see Gorbachev in the center committed to reform. And we are working with who is there to facilitate the peaceful evolution.”

Formally, that means working with both Gorbachev and the leaders of the republics. As Gorbachev has lost control over even the budget of his central government, however, it is increasingly the republics that count.

In the long run, officials said, the Administration still hopes that the Soviet republics will decide to hang together in some kind of economic community or loose political confederation. But in the short run, they said, the only way to influence events in the republics is to accept their right to independence.

“The pressures on both Russia and the Ukraine, plus the other former union republics, to form some kind of economic union . . . will be very strong,” Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Niles said, but he added, “It may be some time before the dust settles.”

As a result, Niles is making his first official visit to Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, this weekend. In a telling gesture, he flew there directly from Germany, without stopping in Moscow first.

Next weekend, Secretary of State James A. Baker III is heading for the Soviet Union, and for the first time he will spend more time with leaders of the republics--in Moscow, Kiev and Minsk, capital of Belarus (formerly Byelorussia)--than with Gorbachev or his newly returned foreign minister, Eduard A. Shevardnadze.

More important, officials said, Bush has decided to offer formal diplomatic recognition to each of the 12 republics of the Soviet Union on the same terms that he extended to Ukraine last week: democracy, human rights, preservation of existing borders and respect for international agreements, especially arms control treaties.

First in line for recognition, along with Ukraine, are giant Russia and tiny Armenia--and, officials said, they will probably get it at about the same time the new government in Kiev does.

The Administration does not want to slight Russia--which is expected to inherit most of the Soviet Union’s armed forces, including its nuclear weapons--by recognizing Ukraine first, officials said.

At the same time, they noted, Armenia has fulfilled the U.S. conditions for recognition as well as any other republic--with a plus. “Armenia has something the others don’t have: a constituency in a large and important state,” said one State Department official, referring to the large Armenian-American community in California.

“It’s a delicate process,” a senior Administration official said.

Bush’s offer of recognition for Ukraine last week, made after the republic’s citizens voted for independence in a referendum, was thus intended as the beginning of a process that officials hope will give the United States some leverage over the new post-Soviet governments.

The Administration wants the republics to work with each other on free-trade and financial agreements to prevent their closely linked economies from collapsing together in a crisis that would make Europe shudder. It wants them to agree not to fight over their borders, lest dozens of ancient disputes revive and touch off a round of Eurasian civil wars.

Most of all, the Administration wants them to work with Gorbachev, the United States and each other to keep the Soviet nuclear arsenal of 27,000 weapons under firm control--and to dissuade Ukraine and other emerging states from becoming nuclear powers in their own right.

“We don’t need any more nuclear powers,” Bush said in Ontario, Calif., on Friday. “As these independent republics come forward . . . this problem of nuclear proliferation must concern us.”

The President was so concerned, he said, that he raised the subject with Kravchuk last week when he telephoned the Ukrainian leader to congratulate him on the referendum. An estimated 4,000 nuclear warheads are in Ukraine, according to the private Natural Resources Defense Council.

So far, Bush and other officials said, the responses from Kravchuk, Russia’s Yeltsin and leaders of other republics have been good. Kravchuk has said that he wants to destroy the nuclear weapons on his territory without turning them over to Russia or anyone else.

“They’ve said all the right things,” a State Department official said. “But the proof is in the doing.

“Destroying nuclear weapons is a complicated thing,” he added. “You can’t do it instantly. And, over time, there may be other Ukrainian politicians who will be tempted by the idea of retaining some kind of nuclear force.”

Officials said they were also pleased by Kravchuk’s decision to hold an early meeting with the leaders of neighboring Russia and Belarus this weekend.

“They aren’t turning their backs on a political and economic relationship with each other, and that’s encouraging,” said one.

Officials said conflicts among the fledgling states appear inevitable over issues from borders to trade to the treatment of ethnic minorities--especially the sizable Russian populations in non-Russian republics. But they said they hope the Administration, by moving more rapidly toward dealing directly with the republics, is in a better position now to help.

“When you’re in a boat going down a river, you have to be moving faster than the current in order to steer yourself,” one official said. “Until now, we’ve been slower than the current, and that wasn’t a good place to be. But we are catching up.”