President Putin was the first winner from the Nato summit in Bucharest, and he wasn't even there. The Nato-Russia Council begins only today, but Putin, who has played the Western alliance with obsessive skill in his last months as President, ensured that relations with Russia dominated the earlier gathering.

For him and George W. Bush, Bucharest was a battle of the legacies, and on points Putin won. The summit failed to give a date for Ukraine and Georgia to join, which Bush had forthrightly declared it should, but which Germany and France blocked, partly to avoid antagonising Russia. Gordon Brown yesterday said that “no one outside a Nato meeting could influence it”, but Russia's threats and courtship seem to have done just that.

The summit did make an unequivocal declaration that “these countries will become members of Nato”, which is powerful rhetoric, but remains vulnerable to members' doubts, whether or not because of Russian pressure behind the scenes. Putin did lose one important point, however: Nato committed itself to hosting the US missile defence bases in the Czech Republic and Poland.

Bucharest has been a hugely important summit for Nato. You cannot say, as so often before, that the alliance is shaking itself apart for lack of purpose. Russia's new abrasiveness has given Nato something serious to think about. But the summit has revealed a deep split on how to deal with it: between the US and Eastern European countries, who want to press the borders of Nato up to Russia without apology, and Germany (with some back-up from France), which wants to tread softly.

The week has also revealed a rift on combating terrorism, the summit's second big theme. European countries do not feel themselves at war with Islamic fundamentalism in the way that the US does, nor the need generally to support large military forces. The summit drummed up enough new troops (mainly French, with a few Romanians) for the Afghan conflict to stop the Canadians pulling out. But the device to span this gulf within the alliance was to shift the burden towards civilian help. In Afghanistan, that help is certainly needed - but that help cannot get off the ground without security.

The troops pledge made it a good week for Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, who pledged the bulk of the new troops. It has not been a good summit for Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, who has played into Russian hands despite her past wariness of that relationship. Nor has it for Gordon Brown, who let it be known that he was instinctively on the American side on Ukraine and Georgia, but given that Bush wasn't going to win, was on the side of compromise. This is cautious to a fault.

It was not a bad performance for Bush, even though he didn't get what he wanted. He set out the US's principled position, and if there is ever a place where the big American phrases about liberty and democracy do not sound empty, then it is in a former Soviet bloc country, on the subject of Russia.

It was a terrible week for Macedonia, for Greece, and for the whole alliance on the peripheral but dismaying treatment of that tiny country, shut out of Nato even though it has jumped all the required hurdles, simply because Greece wants it to choose a name that could not contain territorial aspirations (as Greece sees it) to its northern province. Greece has won itself no fans.

Britain was too dismissive in saying, in a spokesman's words, that it was “merely an issue about the name” which “could be resolved quite quickly”. Europe - and Nato - neglects the poison of the Balkan squabbles at its peril.

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