2 Former Soviet Republics Elect Russia Backers

Voters in Ukraine and Belarus, whose leaders conspired to break up the Soviet Union 2 1/2 years ago, have elected presidents favoring closer ties with Russia, official returns showed Monday.

The turnabout is expected to give Moscow greater sway over its old empire.

Leonid Kuchma, a 55-year-old former missile factory director who campaigned against a “suicidal course of isolation from Russia,” won 52% of the vote to upset President Leonid Kravchuk in a close contest in Ukraine, one of the most stubbornly independent former Soviet republics.

Alexander Lukashenko, 39, an obscure onetime collective farm director, ran a crudely populist campaign to become Belarus’ first president, defeating Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich by a landslide in a race between two advocates of monetary union with Russia.

Both winners in Sunday’s runoffs often spoke Russian on the campaign trail, urging angry voters to dump incumbents whom they blamed for undermining the ideals of independence by running corrupt administrations and stagnant, un-reforming economies.

Officials in Moscow--joined by a host of politicians from former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky--welcomed the outcomes. They predicted a tighter alliance among the three Slavic nations at the core of the former union.

“I doubt that the Soviet Union will ever be restored, but I am sure the republics are getting closer to a confederation of some kind,” said Sergei B. Stankevich, a member of the Russian Parliament’s foreign affairs committee.

Russian Economics Minister Alexander N. Shokhin said the Kremlin will seek early meetings with both new presidents. In the case of Ukraine, he said, Russia is eager to discuss “which of our old pains can be rapidly cured.”

The emerging ties will be closely watched by the West, which has often fretted over Russia’s neo-imperialist ambitions as a potential source of violent conflict with its smaller neighbors. Ukrainian nationalists warned that their country, which voted sharply along regional and ethnic lines, could split apart if Kuchma moves too close to Russia.

Kuchma’s victory also worries the West because he favors re-examining Ukraine’s commitment to ship to Russia the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union. While supporting eventual disarmament, Kuchma said in the campaign that Ukraine is getting too little money from the West in return. Apparently hoping to help Kravchuk, President Clinton and other leaders of the seven leading industrialized nations meeting in Naples, Italy, announced on election eve a $4.2-million aid package for Ukraine.

But Kuchma rode to victory on a wave of economic discontent in the eastern and southern Ukrainian provinces where ethnic Russians are a majority. He won 90% of the vote in the disputed Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and 79% in the coal-mining district of Donetsk.

“Ukraine is 80% dependent on the raw materials of Russia,” Kuchma said in a televised debate last week. “This is oil, this is lumber. Even beyond our 1,000-year shared history, we are obliged to our great neighbor.”

Kravchuk, who quarreled repeatedly with Moscow and portrayed the challenger as a traitor who might give up sovereignty, got as much as 96% of the vote in some regions of the nationalist western half of the country, which was Sovietized only after World War II.

It was Kravchuk and Belarus leader Stanislav Shushkevich who met with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin in December, 1991, to declare independence from a dying Soviet Union and set up the loose, ineffectual Commonwealth of Independent States.

In the past two years, Yeltsin has reasserted Russia’s hegemony over its neighbors, sending troops to intervene in ethnic conflicts and posting border guards along most of the perimeter of the former Soviet Union. Moscow has also pressed other republics for more favorable trade conditions by threatening to withhold oil and gas supplies.

Faced with higher inflation and weaker currencies than in Russia, voters in energy-poor Belarus and Ukraine opted for closer banking and trade ties with Moscow rather than strong free-market reforms at home. Neither Lukashenko nor Kuchma, who was ineffective as Kravchuk’s prime minister for 11 months, offered a detailed economic plan.

Last April, Belarus’ Kebich negotiated a treaty with Russia that would abolish the local currency and adopt the Russian ruble. Shushkevich, the independence leader who was ousted last January as Speaker of Parliament, opposed the treaty and finished a distant fourth in first-round voting June 23.

Lukashenko, a fiery anti-corruption crusader who threatened to expel crooked officials to the Himalayas with no time to pack, won 80% of the runoff vote--a huge protest against the political Establishment. Kebich, who became prime minister in 1990, polled 14%.

Russian officials made no secret of their preference for Kebich but were pleased that Lukashenko gave general endorsement to the currency treaty, which has not been implemented.

In Ukraine, Kuchma has called for settling a potentially violent dispute over the Black Sea naval fleet by leasing Russia not only a share of its warships but also the Crimean port of Sevastopol, a prize that Kravchuk has refused in endless negotiations to give up.

Times special correspondent Mary Mycio in Kiev and Sergei Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.

Profile: Alexander Gregoriyevich Lukashenko

Born: Aug. 30, 1954, in eastern Belarus.

Title: First president of Belarus.

Education: Graduated from Mogilev Pedagogical Institute in 1975.

Career highlights: Held various Communist Party jobs after college. A country boy, he went into farming in 1982, becoming deputy chairman of Udarnik collective farm. Became director of the Gorodets State Farm in 1987. Elected in 1990 a “people’s deputy” to Belarus Parliament. Was lone Belarus deputy to vote against December, 1991, agreements in which Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and leaders of Belarus and Ukraine codified breakup of Soviet Union.

Personal: Married with two sons. A dark-faced man with a heavy, 18th-Century mustache, he is often compared to Russian neo-fascist lawmaker Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky for energy and fiery appeal in often grammatically flawed speeches.