Ex-Soviet Forces Will Not Reunite

The military commander of the Commonwealth of Independent States on Tuesday officially gave up on trying to form NATO-style joint forces from among the fractious former republics of the Soviet Union.

“I’m starting to feel either a peculiar vacuum around myself or that I’m up against an impenetrable wall,” complained Air Marshal Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov, who has already accepted a new job as Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s top security adviser.

He predicted that joint Commonwealth troops would eventually come into being. But “for now,” he said, “the united armed forces of the C.I.S. do not exist, and to create them in the near future is problematic” because of nationalism and fears of Russian imperialism.

Shaposhnikov said the Commonwealth command could be turned into a “headquarters for coordinating military cooperation” during a transition period through the rest of 1993, the Interfax news agency reported.

The abandonment of plans for joint forces came as the latest signal that the Commonwealth, formed as a loose union to replace the Soviet Union in late 1991, is just not cutting it as a political entity.

Eager to keep the impressive Soviet military machine from falling apart chaotically, Shaposhnikov had pressed hard to keep much of the old Red Army united under the Commonwealth aegis, begging for three years of careful transition. But former republics began creating their own national armies right and left, and the Commonwealth commander found himself with no troops and little attention.