Next Step : World Comes Calling on Rich Ukraine : Russia is unhappy about the new popularity of its neighbor. The bad feelings are widening the rift in the struggling Commonwealth.

A new world has opened up for Ukraine.

Overshadowed for centuries by neighboring Russia, Europe’s wallflower is suddenly one of its most popular consorts. U.S. senators, World Bank officials and even Iranian oil merchants have to wait their turn to woo this newly discovered partner, with her dowry of 52 million people and rich industrial and agricultural resources.

Ukrainian news programs are a parade of smiling envoys bearing the diplomatic equivalents of candy and flowers--notes of recognition, trade deals, cultural and educational exchange programs. Each new suitor is welcomed with open arms.

“Peace, friendship and understanding are the alpha and omega of our internal and foreign relations,” says President Leonid Kravchuk, who proudly notes the 90-odd countries that have recognized Ukraine since its landslide vote for independence last December.

From Kiev, however, it seems as though Russia isn’t very happy with Ukraine’s international debut. Although Moscow has also recognized the independence of what had been its prized colony for 350 years, officials here fear that Russia’s commitment to democracy stops at the Ukrainian border.

“Many so-called Russian ‘democrats’ just can’t adjust to Ukraine’s independence,” complains Dmytro Pavlychko, chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament’s foreign relations committee. “They keep looking for a way to hitch Ukraine back to Russia.”

But the Ukrainians want nothing of it, and the conflict forms the leitmotif of today’s widening rift between the two biggest powers in the new Commonwealth of Independent States. Their quarrels over the Black Sea fleet, the Crimea and the division of the former Soviet Union’s debts and assets are more than simple property disputes. They symbolize profoundly different approaches to post-Soviet existence.

Over the weekend, Ukrainian representatives refused to sign a series of key agreements that would preserve old Soviet trade links and maintain a common market among the Commonwealth’s 11 members--a refusal that could bring the group’s collapse as the successor to the Soviet Union.

With the end of communist ideology, all the ex-Soviet republics are retreating into their own brands of nationalism. In Ukraine, that means full independence. In Russia, “nationalism means chauvinism,” charges Ivan Zajets, a prominent member of the Ukrainian Parliament. “They look at the territory of other states as their own,” he says, pointing to Russia’s attempts to reclaim the Black Sea’s Crimean Peninsula, which was transferred from Russian to Ukrainian jurisdiction in 1954 by the late Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Many other Ukrainian politicians agree with Zajets, and as evidence they point to Russia’s role in the new Commonwealth. “Some Russian politicians see it as a way to preserve imperial institutions,” contends Pavlychko, who thinks that’s why Russia is actively supporting a united Commonwealth military force.

Ukraine’s opposition to a unified military is closely tied to its view of the Commonwealth. “It is a mechanism for negotiations,” Kravchuk insists of the Commonwealth--not a country.

Mechanisms don’t have militaries. Nations do. Therefore, the Ukrainians see Russia’s attempts to preserve the military as a slippery slope from Commonwealth back to empire.

“Ukraine’s goals in the Commonwealth are completely opposite to Russia’s goals,” says Serhij Holovatij, another member of Parliament. “Russia wants to strengthen it. Ukraine sees it as temporary.” The difference has split the C.I.S. ranks.

“There are two centers in the C.I.S.: Russia and Ukraine,” declares Pavlychko, and the military issue is an acid test of their differing views. The Ukrainian-led bloc, including Moldova, Belarus, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, all want their own militaries as steps towards full independence. The rest of the republics have thrown their weight behind the Russian-dominated C.I.S. force.

Friction over the issue has become so heated that it is likely to focus attention on Kravchuk when he shuttles off this week to another meeting of the Commonwealth heads of state in Minsk.

Kravchuk has been hinting for over a month that Ukraine may leave the Commonwealth. He derides what he sees as Russia’s attempts to dominate the union, its territorial claims and its opposition to Ukraine’s efforts to build its own armed forces as symptoms of “imperial sickness.” And he has warned that the C.I.S. has no future “if attempts are made to return to imperial times.”

The economic entanglements that bind Ukraine to Russia and the other former Soviet republics would make life without the Commonwealth difficult. But even if Ukraine remains in the C.I.S. for now, Pavlychko predicts: “It will be much easier for Ukraine to orient towards (Western) Europe than to stay in this Commonwealth that has nothing to offer except a single army.”

Ukraine’s reorientation from East to West is already taking place. Last week, while European diplomats were scouring the Kiev real estate market for premises suitable for embassies and apartments, nearly everyone who is anyone in the Ukrainian government was visiting neighbors to the West. The foreign minister was in Prague, the Speaker of the Parliament was in France and the president took off for Germany and Switzerland.

They went in search of political cooperation, economic advice and, perhaps most important for this old nation but new state, for acceptance from its neighbors.

Europe’s interest in welcoming Ukraine into its fold is compelling. “The more Ukraine is integrated into the CFE (treaty reducing conventional forces in Europe) and other European institutions, the more it will have a vested interest in playing by the rules,” notes U.S. Charge d’Affaires John Gunderson.

Playing by the rules is no small matter for Ukraine, which still has 176 strategic missiles and untold numbers of tactical nuclear weapons on its territory along with about 400,000 ex-Soviet army troops that have sworn an oath to defend Ukrainian independence.

Officials here believe they have made every effort to show their peaceful intentions to countries such as Germany that have expressed concern about Ukraine’s military potential.

“Ukraine is sacrificing the nuclear weapons on its territory to Russia for the sake of stability,” says Zajets, “even though we may be hurting ourselves by doing it.” As for the size of Ukraine’s armed forces, he points out that it depends largely on perceived threats to its independence, particularly from Russia.

Ironically, Ukraine’s closest Western neighbors are less concerned about its armed forces than about more prosaic matters. Vyacheslav Chornovil, a member of Parliament and head of the Lvov regional council in western Ukraine, says that in his meetings with Polish officials, “one of our biggest problems is unregulated trade across the Ukrainian-Polish border.”

Various proposals have been floated to create new multinational groups that might act as a counterbalance to Russian economic and political power and enable Ukraine to exercise greater regional leadership--”Carpathian Committees,” “Black Sea Brotherhoods” and “Baltic-Black Sea Corridors.” None of these proposed arrangements--which would more closely link Ukraine with such neighbors as Romania, Hungary, Poland, Belarus, and the Baltic peoples of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania--has so far gone beyond the talking stage among various foreign policy analysts.

Meanwhile, as Ukraine opens its doors to the outside world, it is likely to hammer out better ties with France, the United States and even Japan than with Russia. After all, those relations are starting out with a relatively clean slate.

Ukraine and Russia, by contrast, have never dealt as sovereign equals. How they rid themselves of nearly four centuries of historical baggage, casting aside the master-colony relationship for something new, will be a key factor in the stability of the post-Soviet “new world order.”