NEWS ANALYSIS : Conference May Offer More Hope Than Help to Ex-Soviet Republics : Foreign aid: More than 50 nations will discuss a global effort to ship supplies to Russia and its neighbors.

A few weeks ago, Russia’s foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, startled an American official in Moscow with an unexpected plea.

“We need a symbol,” Kozyrev reportedly said. “If you can’t give us anything substantive, give us something symbolic. We need to see some sign that America and the West care.”

This week, when President Bush convenes an international conference on foreign aid to the republics of the former Soviet Union, the Russian will probably get his wish.

The conference on Wednesday and Thursday will bring together foreign ministers and other officials from more than 50 countries to discuss a global effort to ship food, medicine and other supplies to Russia and its neighbors.

But the outcome is likely to be more symbolic than real, at least in the short run. U.S. and other Western officials insist that the 12 former Soviet republics already have most of the food they need to make it through the winter, and they say it’s already too late to organize a much larger effort.

The real impact of this week’s meeting, they say, may be on the Russian mind, not the Russian stomach.

“One of the most important things is to give hope to those people,” a senior U.S. official explained. “They need a psychological Band-Aid, a bridge over a rough time.”

Offering solace to the consumers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and thus bolstering the reformist government of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, is only one of several goals that this week’s meeting has gradually acquired.

When Secretary of State James A. Baker III proposed the meeting in a speech last month, he said its goal was modest: to coordinate U.S. and allied humanitarian aid programs so countries don’t duplicate each others’ good works.

But in the absence of other efforts, the conference has become a symbolic centerpiece of the West’s desire to help reform efforts succeed--without spending a penny more than necessary.

Instead of nameless experts laboring over the details of agricultural loans and medical shipments, the meeting will bring together at least three dozen foreign ministers and, briefly, President Bush--a deliberately high-profile commitment to help.

Baker promised that the meeting would not be a “pledging session” to extract promises of new aid, but he deliberately invited Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich countries and made it clear that announcements of new aid commitments would certainly be welcome.

By making the conference an American initiative and by holding it in Washington, Baker asserted a leadership role on the issue for the United States, even though the Bush Administration has been agonizingly slow to pledge any taxpayer money for aid.

Some European and Japanese diplomats grumbled that the secretary of state was leading an aid effort that depends on “other people’s money.” But they acknowledged that the meeting was a good idea.

And, they noted hopefully, by holding the meeting in Washington, Baker might have a psychological impact on American voters and members of Congress as well as on Russians, softening up domestic opposition to larger requests for aid that may come later this year.

“With your country in an election campaign and very inward looking, the fact that this conference is being held in Washington might make it easier for your government to explain (Russian aid requests) to your public,” a senior German official said.

So far, the United States has pledged about $4.6 billion in aid to the former Soviet republics. However, 83% of that is not cash, but in loans or loan guarantees for purchases of American farm goods. About $300 million has been pledged in grants for emergency food and medicine, and for transportation of privately donated supplies.

By contrast, Germany has committed more than $37 billion, including $735 million in food and medicine. (The biggest part of Bonn’s bill, $11 billion, has gone for the upkeep and withdrawal of Soviet troops from the former East Germany.)

Bush Administration officials say they are committed to provide, together with other countries, enough aid to prevent Russia and its neighbors from sliding into anarchy--or from turning into an authoritarian regime that might threaten the rest of the world.

“This isn’t charity,” a senior U.S. official said bluntly. “This is not like helping Haiti. This is a country that really matters. . . . If Yeltsin and the others don’t make it, who knows what’s going to happen?”

The U.S. humanitarian aid effort is going to be concentrated on Moscow and St. Petersburg, the official added, because those are the most politically sensitive cities in the former Soviet Union.

However, Administration officials quickly add that they don’t want to be seen as spending money needlessly on Russian relief amid a presidential election campaign, a battle in which Bush’s Republican challenger, Patrick J. Buchanan, has accused the President of paying too much attention to foreign policy.

As a measure of the political sensitivity of the issue, Bush and his aides debated for several days whether or not he should address the opening session of the conference. They did so even though, with more than three dozen allied foreign ministers present, the meeting will be one of the most important ever held in Washington, at least in terms of protocol.

Lurking just behind the issue of immediate humanitarian aid is a more complex problem: How should the United States and its allies help the former Soviet republics transform their economies into Western-style markets?

Last week, Yeltsin’s chief American economic adviser, Harvard University Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, said that the West should provide as much as $20 billion in aid just to make that process work--a sum that goes far beyond anything the Administration has been willing to endorse so far.

Sachs said most of the money is needed for a fund to stabilize the ruble, Russia’s nearly worthless currency, and enable the republics to engage in normal foreign trade.

A senior Administration official said last week that it is still too early to consider aid at that scale and that Russia should first negotiate a comprehensive reform program with the International Monetary Fund--a process that will require several months at least.

“If I had the money . . . I wouldn’t feel responsible in putting it up,” he said.

But other officials predicted that the Administration and its allies in Europe and Japan will be forced to ante up billions of dollars in economic stabilization funds later this year or watch Yeltsin’s economic reforms collapse.

“This issue will come up big time,” said one. “We won’t be able to just dodge it.”

Diplomats said that Baker, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and other foreign ministers at this week’s conference will almost surely find themselves talking about the long-range aid issue, even though it isn’t formally on the agenda.

Present at the meeting will be officials from both Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America as well as Canada and the United States--”anybody who can contribute,” a State Department spokesman said.

But Russia and the other once-Soviet republics--the recipients of this week’s concern--won’t be there.

“They weren’t invited,” a German official said. “They might start quarreling among themselves over who are the neediest.”