Ex-Soviet States Move to Improve Loose Ties : Diplomacy: They seek to calm political and ethnic strife and agree to join arms-reduction pacts.

Leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States sought Friday to improve their economic and international relations and to calm ethnic and political warfare in their region, which is still in flux 10 months after the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

“We are moving slowly, step by step, to create a legal basis for regulating all our relations, including economic, political and military,” Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan told reporters after a meeting of the Commonwealth’s heads of state in Bishkek, the capital of this mountainous Central Asian republic.

The leaders agreed to create an inter-republican committee to help integrate their feeble economies, but they decided against giving it executive powers. Some leaders, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk in particular, rejected the idea of an alliance with any kind of central governing body.

“The Commonwealth heads of state have effectively voted in favor of a looser and less binding association than it was even supposed earlier,” a Russian television anchor said, commenting on the meeting.

Ter-Petrosyan also stressed the Commonwealth’s amorphous character, noting: “I cannot say that any of the questions have been finally and unequivocally resolved during all these eight meetings (the leaders of the members of Commonwealth) have had. This is a creative process. Today we approved it. Tomorrow we may revise it.”

But one decision reached Friday appeared irreversible: The newly independent countries agreed to join treaties on reduction of medium- and short-range nuclear weapons and on the limitation of antiballistic missiles; the agreements had been forged originally between the Soviet Union and the United States.

The leaders could not agree to give Russia sole control of the former Soviet Union’s strategic nuclear weapons, located on territories in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Although Belarus and Kazakhstan are ready to give Russia control of nuclear weapons on their territories, Ukraine’s Kravchuk refused.

As one step toward controlling the economic chaos that grips the region, six of 10 republics in the Commonwealth agreed to create an interstate bank to facilitate payments between enterprises in different republics.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did complex systems to distribute materials from one factory to another and to make payments; as a result, production has plummeted in all the former Soviet republics.

The new interstate bank, expected to start functioning on Jan. 1, first would help to coordinate payments; later it would take on functions of a central bank, said Viktor Gerashchenko, chief of the Russian Central Bank.

“The bank’s purpose is to create a system of interstate payments,” Gerashchenko said. “Later, it will probably deal with the issuance of money.

“In the future,” he added, it “may become an international bank of the ‘ruble zone’ “--that is, it would be an institution serving those former Soviet republics, now independent nations, that want to trade with each other using the common currency of the ruble.

The four republics that did not sign the agreement have reserved the right to do so later. But Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Shokhin stressed that they must decide soon, “because the International Monetary Fund set us a deadline of Jan. 1. By that time, we must have a definite ruble zone.”

Billions of dollars of international aid hinge on Russia’s adherence to IMF guidelines.

While the leaders talked, warfare raged in several parts of the Commonwealth. The hottest spots include Abkhazia, a breakaway Georgian region; the border area between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan, a neighboring republic to Kyrgyzstan.

The heads of state gave special attention to Tajikistan. They issued a statement saying they support a decision by the Kyrgyzstan government to send peacekeeping forces to the Central Asian republic; they pledged to send Commonwealth peacekeepers if the Tajikistan government agrees.

Times special correspondent Ostroukh reported from Bishkek. Staff writer Shogren reported from Moscow.