Russia and Ukraine Hail Friendship : Commonwealth: Yeltsin, Kravchuk partly resolve dispute over Black Sea Fleet. They will join in talks Thursday on warfare in Moldova.

The leaders of Russia and Ukraine, smoothing relations that had threatened to explode the Commonwealth of Independent States, emerged from their first summit meeting Tuesday proclaiming new heights of friendship and cooperation.

“Never before has there been so complete an understanding between Russia and Ukraine,” Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin told vacationers who crowded around him in this Black Sea resort town. “We agreed on all things.”

The two leaders even managed to partially resolve their persistent dispute over how to split the Black Sea Fleet, the 380-ship flotilla that both countries claim. They will continue talks on splitting up the ships, they said, but will jointly operate the bases on the Crimean shores and eventually create both a Ukrainian fleet and a Russian fleet there.

Coming on the heels of Yeltsin’s diplomatic triumph last week in America, the Russian-Ukrainian summit gave the Russian president another prestige-boosting success. It also offered hope that the fledgling Commonwealth will stop serving as an arena for Russian-Ukrainian wrangling and take on greater substance.

According to reports filtering out of the closed-door summit, Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk did fail to agree on one key issue: control of the nuclear weapons still remaining on Ukrainian soil.

Although strategic forces based in Ukraine fall under the command of the Commonwealth’s joint forces, Ukrainian officials want to control the soldiers’ salaries, housing and other administrative needs. Russian officials object strongly to the idea, warning of “the erosion of nuclear stability.”

“In point of fact, this would lead to a dual subordination of strategic units--to Ukraine and to the Commonwealth armed forces,” Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev said.

Kravchuk did agree, however, to seek rapid ratification of all nuclear treaties that affect Ukraine and reaffirmed his country’s commitment to get rid of all its remaining strategic nuclear weapons by the end of 1994.

In a sign of their future amity, Russia and Ukraine also agreed not to close off their border of more than 700 miles but rather to gradually introduce customs posts there and retain a no-visa program. And the two leaders, who at one point strolled chummily along the beachfront in the bright sunshine, announced that they would make a habit of summit meetings in the future.

Yeltsin announced that he, Kravchuk and the leaders of Moldova and Romania will meet Thursday in Istanbul, Turkey, to try to bring peace to the strife-torn Dniester region of Moldova, where fighting between Slavic separatists and ethnic Moldovans has killed hundreds in recent days.

Moldovan President Mircea Snegur called for a cease-fire and asked the U.N. Security Council to discuss what he termed “Russian aggression” in Moldova, but the shelling and shooting continued in the breakaway Trans-Dniester Republic.

Vitaly Yefimov, chairman of a Russian commission that just returned from the region, described “this continuous roar of artillery shells, the sound of large-caliber machine guns.”

“We saw people digging graves right in front of a building, because it was impossible to collect and bury the dead bodies. . . ,” Yefimov said. “A real war was taking place.”

Despite reports that parts of Russia’s 14th Army stationed in Moldova has begun to intervene on the side of Slavic separatists, the commission maintained that Russian soldiers there have not actively entered the fighting and that Russia still intends to keep them out of it.

“We do not regard ourselves as a party involved in the conflict,” Deputy Foreign Minister Vitaly Churkin said.

In another peace initiative, Yeltsin is scheduled to meet today with Georgian leader Eduard A. Shevardnadze to discuss the bloodshed in the Georgian enclave of South Ossetia. Georgian troops fighting Ossetian separatists there have sent refugees north into Russia.

Continuing his diplomatic barnstorming, Yeltsin is expected to sign a treaty on cooperation among countries bordering the Black Sea on Thursday.

Here in Dagomys, Yeltsin’s apparent negotiating success stemmed in part from his agreement with Kravchuk not to discuss the biggest irritant to their relations aside from the Black Sea Fleet: the question of which country has the right to the Crimean Peninsula.

Transferred to Ukrainian control from Russia in 1954 by Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Crimea is such a hot point of Russian-Ukrainian contention that both sides have sounded warnings that the dispute could lead to war.

An ebullient Yeltsin acknowledged that “the relations between our countries have not been in the best possible shape, and there have been frictions that worried the presidents, our peoples and our parliaments.”

But now, he said, “We jointly arrived at the conclusion that these relations must be brought back to the path of friendship, cooperation and cordiality.”

Russia and Ukraine agreed to work out a full-scale political treaty for signing.

Staff writer Goldberg reported from Moscow and Grebenshikov, a reporter in The Times’ Moscow Bureau, reported from Dagomys.