Kiev-Moscow Pact Gives Russia Most of Black Sea Fleet : Accord: Agreement defuses volatile situation. Ukraine was approaching a showdown over the disputed armada.

Less than a week after their sailors came to the brink of armed conflict, Russia and Ukraine announced a tentative agreement Friday to give Russia the bulk of the disputed Black Sea Fleet and a leased naval base on Ukrainian territory.

Hastily drafted after a summit meeting of the 12-nation Commonwealth of Independent States, the accord was signed here by the Russian and Ukrainian presidents in a move to defuse the most serious military showdown between the Soviet Union’s mightiest successor states.

At the summit itself, Commonwealth leaders declared their readiness to send peacekeepers to halt ethnic conflicts in Georgia and Azerbaijan and extended the mandate of a Russian-led force to defend the government of Tajikistan against Tajik rebels based in Afghanistan.

While those conflicts have taken tens of thousands of lives, it is the bloodless tension between Ukraine and Russia, both armed with Soviet nuclear weapons, that poses the most serious threat to stability in the former Soviet empire.

It is far from certain that the draft agreement signed Friday by Ukraine and Russia will be hammered out in final detail or ratified by their Parliaments. Half a dozen earlier accords--first calling for dividing the former Soviet fleet 50-50 and then giving it all to Russia--were scuttled.

What distinguishes this deal from the others is that Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk has agreed, for the first time, to lease at least one Ukrainian naval port to Russia. Returning to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, he indicated that the port would be Sevastopol, the fleet’s headquarters, on the Crimean peninsula.

“Thousands of (Russian) officers live in Sevastopol, their children, their families,” he told reporters. “If we say they must leave Sevastopol, we could not propose new housing for them” elsewhere.

Under the agreement between Kravchuk and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, the two foreign ministries have 10 days to divide half a dozen bases, 70,000 sailors and about 300 aging warships and submarines.

“Ukraine will take what it can (financially) support and what it needs, strategically, according to our military doctrine” and sell the rest of its 50% share to Russia, Kravchuk said. Both sides said that means Ukraine will keep about 15% to 20% of the fleet’s vessels.

While the fleet is nominally under joint command, Ukraine has not paid for its upkeep since December and owes Russia more than $3.2 billion for oil and gas. Financial pressures, along with the election this year of a pro-Russian separatist leader in Crimea, underlie the conflict that erupted within the fleet last Saturday.

On that day, Ukrainian ships tried to intercept a Russian research vessel leaving the Ukrainian port of Odessa with $10 million worth of navigational and marine equipment in what the Ukrainians called an act of piracy.

The next evening, Ukrainian commandos seized a maintenance base near Odessa, arrested three Russian officers involved in Saturday’s incident and reportedly roughed up some Russian sailors and their families.

Since then, Russian units of the fleet have gone on combat alert at three other bases and sent amphibious landing craft to pick up Russian service personnel and their families at Odessa. The Ukrainian navy has put the Odessa base and a river patrol unit of the fleet under its direct control.

Kravchuk said the Russian and Ukrainian defense ministries gave orders Friday to “put an end to incidents . . . that could have a chain reaction.”

Ever suspicious of Russian domination, Kravchuk kept aloof from a summit agreement Friday to work toward a free-trade union among former Soviet republics. He agreed only to a vague “associate member” status. The Commonwealth encompasses all former Soviet republics except the three Baltic countries.

In some ways, the one-day summit enhanced Russia’s leadership and ambitions to police the region. Yeltsin, looking healthy and robust after winter bouts with the flu, won the other leaders’ assent to chair the Commonwealth for the rest of this year.

He also pushed through resolutions calling for Commonwealth peacekeepers, which would be dominated by the Russian army, to intervene if necessary in Georgia’s embattled breakaway province of Abkhazia and in the war between Azerbaijan and the ethnic Armenians of that nation’s province of Nagorno-Karabakh.

But the 12 foreign ministers, in a separate meeting Friday, resisted a proposal that would give Russians living in other Commonwealth countries special status, including citizenship in two countries, to protect them from ethnic discrimination.

Nevertheless, Yeltsin said the meeting had drawn the 12 nations closer--a high priority of the nationalist forces now ascendant in Russian politics. For example, he hailed an agreement among Russia, Ukraine and Belarus to coordinate their border guards as a step toward restoring “a single guarded border” around the former Soviet perimeter.

“Our Commonwealth is a reality,” he told reporters. “The Commonwealth is vital for our peoples and states. Today, it is becoming clear that the Commonwealth is a priority direction in our policies.”

Times special correspondent Mary Mycio in Kiev, Ukraine, contributed to this report.