Russia may face awkward questions from its neighbors about its yo-yo currency when it hosts a summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States on Friday, 10 days after the ruble's embarrassing collapse.


The Russian currency's slide on "Black Tuesday," which rang alarm bells throughout the CIS on Oct. 11, will not be on the formal agenda for the one-day meeting of heads of state.


Though none of the other 11 CIS states pegs its currency to the ruble, the stability of the Russian economy is of paramount importance, as all the states struggle with a post-Soviet combination of inflation and slump.


The ruble's fragility could not have come at a worse time for President Boris Yeltsin as he tries to reinforce Russia's role as the leader of a revived economic, political and military community.


Yeltsin is the only founding father of the commonwealth still in office after the arrival in power this year of new presidents in Ukraine and Belarus.


The election of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev and Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk this summer initially looked likely to give a quick boost to hopes of reintegrating the three Slav republics which once formed the core of the Soviet Union. But Russia quickly gave a cold shoulder to Lukashenko's drive for a speedy currency union with the Russian ruble, telling him it would have to wait until Belarus reduced inflation.


Despite Kuchma's pledges to improve Ukraine's relations with Russia and avoid isolation, there is still a long list of bilateral and multilateral problems dividing the two giants of the group.


This month, Kuchma acknowledged the need for a "strategic partnership" with Russia. But Ukraine is still only an associate member of the CIS economic union and is cool to anything which smacks of political or military integration in a Moscow-led bloc.


There are no signs that Kuchma will agree to Russian ideas for a revived military alliance among the states. Ukraine is not a member of the existing CIS security treaty, signed in 1992, which groups only six countries and has proved largely ineffective.


Ukraine did agree at a meeting of government heads last month to set up a new inter-state economic committee with supranational powers and a complicated weighted voting system designed to take account of gross national product.


But it refused to get involved in talks on military and political cooperation and joint protection of borders. Russian politicians say pointedly that the CIS "is not a buffet table at which you can select some items and leave others behind."


Russia and Ukraine are preparing a bilateral treaty but several major issues are still unresolved.


The two governments, while on more cordial terms than before, are still arguing about the fate of the Black Sea Fleet and about Ukraine's debt of more than $1 billion to Moscow, mostly for energy supplies.