Further Splintering of Soviet Army Seen : Military: Chief of forces says he hopes for an orderly breakup rather than the emergence of divisive nationalism.

The military commander of the Commonwealth of Independent States predicted Tuesday that the Soviet armed forces will continue to break up into national armies but expressed his hope that the process will not lead to conflict.

Air Marshal Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov, the former Soviet defense minister, said that, despite the agreement by Commonwealth leaders last week to maintain the unity of perhaps two-thirds of the former Soviet forces under Commonwealth command for two or three years, each of the now-independent states would ultimately want its own army.

His hope is that the process will be orderly and not add to the political turmoil here, he said. In the end, a defense alliance along the lines of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization might emerge, he added, rather than a resurgence of divisive nationalism.

The future of the former Soviet armed forces, which was the world’s largest, has emerged as a key political as well as security issue with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For some former Soviet republics, establishment of their own armies has been a defining act of sovereignty; for others, preservation of the old Soviet armed forces, virtually the last such Soviet institution, was a test of their ability to retain a measure of cohesion in the Commonwealth.

Sergei M. Shakhrai, a Russian deputy prime minister and Yeltsin adviser, told Russian lawmakers Tuesday that the dissolution of the Soviet military poses serious risks to the Commonwealth.

“Both politicians and deputies realize one thing clearly--the collapse of the Commonwealth now is a 103% guarantee of a military coup d’etat ,” Shakhrai said. That coup would seep across not only Russia and Ukraine, he said, “but the whole geopolitical space that used to be called the Soviet Union,” unless continuous negotiations are undertaken.

Leaders of the Commonwealth’s 11 member states had agreed at a summit last Friday to maintain central control over the nuclear arsenal they inherited from the Soviet Union; only eight states, and two of those reluctantly, agreed to keep a unified command for conventional forces. This means there will soon be seven armies, including those of the Baltic Republics--Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania--on the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Ukraine has sworn in a reported 400,000 military personnel and is already well on the way to creating one of Europe’s largest armies. Battling Russia over which Soviet units and equipment belong to it rather than the Commonwealth forces, Ukraine this week claimed 21 bombers equipped to fire nuclear-armed cruise missiles and drop nuclear bombs.

“Since the Commonwealth is not a state or a superstate but a union of states, each member is completely independent with all the attributes of a sovereign state, including its own armed forces,” Shaposhnikov said.

But he argued that Ukraine is claiming units, including the regiment of bombers and ships of the Black Sea Fleet, that belong to the Commonwealth’s forces. “I am against this idea that everything deployed on Ukrainian territory should belong to Ukraine,” he said.

Russia’s plans are still uncertain, Gen. Konstantin I. Kobets, a defense adviser, told lawmakers on Tuesday, saying: “I think the Russian Defense Ministry will be set up. But when, how, with what tasks, for directing what forces and under what military doctrine remains to be seen.

“These problems are extremely difficult, and we are making little progress.”

Shaposhnikov also warned that Azerbaijan’s plans to establish a national army, and the probability that neighboring Armenia would follow, would mean an escalation of the four-year-old conflict between them over Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed Armenian enclave on Azerbaijani territory in the Caucasus Mountains.

He said he had warned Commonwealth leaders of the danger at their summit meeting in Minsk last Friday but that they had ignored him. Now, he is preparing to pull Commonwealth troops out of the two republics--even though they play an important stabilizing role--so that they do not get involved in the escalating conflict. Faced with demands that “the army must do something there,” Shaposhnikov told a legislative hearing, “No, it will not do anything there, and that’s final. (The army) would rather abandon the place completely than fight.”

Parks is The Times’ Moscow bureau chief, and Grebenshikov is a Moscow bureau reporter.