Russia and Ukraine Seek Sea Change in Sevastopol : Politics: Control over city that is port to Black Sea Fleet and Kiev’s navy is a sticking point in treaty between two nations.

The sailors based at this naval port, sprawled among five jagged bays of the Black Sea, walk the hilly streets in smart black uniforms. You have to look hard at the Cyrillic lettering on their hatbands to tell which of two rival navies they serve.

The sailors themselves eye each other warily, especially at night. Every few weeks, a Ukrainian navy shore patrol arrests a Russian sailor and roughs him up, prompting retaliation by the Russian-dominated Black Sea Fleet.

“As a rule, (the Ukrainian) patrols are drunk, so we arrest the drunks, make them sober and turn them over to the police,” said Capt. Andrei Grachev, the Black Sea Fleet spokesman.

Since newly independent Ukraine founded its navy in 1992 with defectors and ships from the Black Sea Fleet, people here have wondered anxiously whether their city, the object of sea battles in the 1853-56 Crimean War and in World War II, is big enough for two armadas.

Now faced with the same question, Ukraine’s leaders say yes, Russia’s say no, and the difference stands squarely in the way of a friendship treaty ending their bitter custody fight over a major remnant of the Soviet military.

The dispute between the most powerful former Soviet republics is so worrisome that U.S. officials, preparing for President Clinton’s visit to Moscow and Kiev next month, have offered to mediate, as Washington did last year to achieve a nuclear disarmament accord between them.

It has taken Russia and Ukraine three years of painstaking negotiations to agree on how to divide more than 300 warships and other vessels of the fleet, which is headquartered here and temporarily under joint command of the two presidents. Under the accord, Ukraine will get 18% of the ships and trade the rest of its 50-50 share to Russia for debt relief.

The remaining disagreement is this: Russia insists on exclusive rights to all naval facilities in Sevastopol, which was founded by Russians during the 18th-Century reign of Catherine the Great but was ceded to Ukraine, along with the rest of the Crimean peninsula, in 1954. Ukraine, while ready to lease out three bays in the city for Russian bases and divide up the shore facilities, refuses to withdraw its own fledgling navy.

“The problem of the fleet, as a fleet, does not exist,” Ukrainian President Leonid D. Kuchma said. “The problem is territory.”

Sevastopol’s status is closely tied to the emotional issue of political autonomy for Crimea, where ethnic Russians are a majority and many have been agitating for separation from Ukraine and re-integration with Russia.

Radical lawmakers in Russia and Ukraine publicly shredded each other’s flags after Kuchma and his Parliament abolished Crimea’s constitution and presidency last month. Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin warned that he would not sign any treaty until Kuchma settles his differences with Crimea’s Russian nationalists “through political dialogue.”

While Yeltsin’s government makes no formal territorial claim to Crimea, Ukrainian leaders say the rights to bases here that Moscow seeks amount to such a claim on the peninsula’s most important city.

“De facto, if you look at a list of the facilities they are demanding and plot them on a map, it is the whole city,” acting Ukrainian Prime Minister Yevhen Marchuk told reporters after fruitless talks with Yeltsin in Moscow last week. “They want all Sevastopol as a Russian base.

“Ukraine will never allow this,” he added. “We have studied every military base in the world, and the first principle is that civilians do not live on military bases. Human rights are limited by the military regime.”

While built for the Black Sea Fleet, Sevastopol is more than a base. Most of its 425,000 inhabitants are civilians, and a quarter of them are ethnic Ukrainians. Local officials want to create a free-trade zone that would attract investment and ease the city’s dependence on the military.

“Let the Russians stay here, but not to rule our lives,” said Tamara Tolochko, a Ukrainian civil engineer getting off the ferry on her way home here one recent rainy afternoon.

Russian officials admit that separating the city from the naval facilities--barracks, wharves, fuel tanks, warehouses, hospitals, buses, schools and consumer outlets that now belong to the Black Sea Fleet--might be too difficult to achieve.

But one thing they do insist on is that the Ukrainian navy move to another Black Sea port away from Crimea, such as Odessa.

“Do the Americans allow the Cuban navy any space at the Guantanamo base in Cuba?” asked Vladimir A. Volkov, a Russian Foreign Ministry official involved in negotiations with the Ukrainians. “Of course not. It’s a question of security.”

Russian officers here sneer at their Ukrainian counterparts, whose navy is made up of exactly five admirals and 10 warships.

“It’s hard to say that this is really a navy, that what it has here is really a base,” said fleet spokesman Grachev from white marble headquarters overlooking the port.

Across town, in a modest stucco building that was once an ensign’s school, Ukrainian commanders are eagerly planning to double the size of their 20,000-member navy and create two marine battalions after acquiring their full share of Black Sea Fleet vessels and aircraft.

Capt. Mikola Savchenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian navy, said it already has an academy functioning and 4,000 officers living with their families in Sevastopol. He said the navy cannot easily move.

But he admitted that basing two navies with divergent strategic interests in the same city might not be such a good idea. “If Russian marines from here invaded Chechnya and the Chechens retaliated, we might get caught in the middle,” Savchenko said.

Russians and Ukrainians already have enough to fight about. Ukrainian nationalists litter the fleet’s bases with messages urging officers to defect “before Yeltsin sells your vessels for scrap.” A few weeks ago, Ukrainian officials cut most of the fleet’s telephone lines to press for overdue payments.

Grachev said the fleet pays 42 different taxes to Ukraine, 40% of its outlays from Moscow--an increasing burden, considering that Ukraine hasn’t paid its share of fleet maintenance since December, 1993.

Each side blames the other for the fleet’s deterioration. The anti-submarine cruiser Moskva, the largest warship, is maintained in part by extra-budgetary donations from the Moscow city government, but it still has been grounded by fuel shortages since Yeltsin boarded for a ride in March, 1992, and promised better days.

As a tentative division of the fleet gets under way, the Ukrainians are often dismayed to learn that some shore facilities at smaller bases they receive have been dismantled and hauled back to Russia or sold off by Russian officers to private companies. Such pilfering, common at Russian bases before they were relinquished to Baltic countries, could complicate the negotiations for an agreement on Sevastopol, Ukrainian officials said.

The fleet’s Danube River patrol base at Izmail and two of its nine cutters were handed over to the Ukrainian navy on April 14, but the base was missing its officers club, steam baths and a warehouse. The Russians deny it, but the three buildings had been sold in October to a Ukrainian trading company for $26,000, a company official said.

Boudreaux was recently on assignment in Sevastopol. Times special correspondent Mary Mycio contributed to this article from Kiev, Ukraine.