BUCHAREST: No one dared call it a lame ducks’ summit, but neither US President George W. Bush nor Russian leader Vladimir Putin copped all that they wanted out of this week’s Nato conclave.

Bush, keen to leave a foreign policy not fully tarnished by Iraq, failed — despite 11th hour lobbying — to secure immediate pre-membership status for erstwhile Soviet republics Georgia and Ukraine.

That was something of a coup for Putin — forever wary of Nato expansion into one-time Soviet soil despite Bush’s invocations that “the Cold War is over” — in the waning days of his eight-year presidency.

But as he prepared to host Bush this weekend at the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi, Putin still had to grudgingly recognise the unequivocal support of all 26 Nato allies for a new-age US missile defence system in eastern Europe.

“Neither Putin nor Bush got everything they wanted, but clearly Putin got more of what he wanted than Bush did,” said Robin Shepherd, who moni-

tors Nato at the Chatham House foreign policy institute in London.

“Putin will go back to Moscow hailing this summit as a great success.”

It was left to Nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer to use time-honoured diplo-talk to concede that Putin and the transatlantic allies could do little more than agree to disagree.

“The discussion was frank and open,” he told reporters. “There was no hiding of views, but the spirit was positive.” He quipped that while Bush and Putin will be out of office when Nato celebrates its 60th anniversary in a year’s time, they could well be seen again — particularly as Putin is set to become prime minister.

“We will miss them,” he said.

For Bush, the most significant result of the summit in Bucharest was a pledge from Nato allies to contribute more in terms of soldiers and material to the effort in Afghanistan.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, keener to show his transatlantic credentials than his predecessor Jacques Chirac ever was, took centre stage with his promise of a French combat battalion.

“The more we put in now, the quicker we can finish the job,” a senior US official said.

Putin, no doubt content to see Nato fight the Taliban in a country the Soviet Union could never tame, pitched in as well, agreeing to let Nato ship non-lethal supplies through Russian territory.

Bush invested heavily in getting Georgia and Ukraine into the Membership Action Plan, which grooms up-and-coming democracies for eventual accession to the world’s biggest military alliance.

Significantly he travelled to Kiev before proceeding to Bucharest, but Shepherd noted that US diplomacy on the issue — unlike that on Afghanistan — was a case of too little, too late.

“It was left until the last minute... without the intensity that was necessary,” he said.

Ditto on another thorny issue — an invitation to Macedonia to begin membership talks alongside Albania and Croatia, which was vetoed by Greece amid a row between Athens and Skopje over Macedonia’s official name.

Having consented to being the staging post for Nato’s deployment in Kosovo for nearly a decade, Macedonia felt it had on option but to stomp out of the summit in protest at what it viewed as a lack of transatlantic gratitude.—AFP