Together with few colleagues of mine, I have noticed our press surrenders to the first charismatic assail easier than a naive young lady surrenders to a fair-haired Prince Charming. As far as Mr. Traian Basescu and the macho habits he cultivates are concerned, the entire mass media has been seized with a thrill, stricken by the staging, otherwise perfect, of Mr. Putin's entry on stage. The ceaseless denouncers of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the anti-Soviets on duty day and night, have decided at once that Vladimir Putin is the great winner of the NATO reunion in Bucharest. But their decision that President George W. Bush was the great loser is not as reasonable. The US President didn't get while in Bucharest the final big bang he wanted and it is anyway fashionable and trendy to mock George W. Bush, as his mandate is approaching the end. But Vladimir Putin... The spinster-lie sighs he got for welcome to the summit didn't help the so honest journalists to do a more careful reading of the reunion's documents and relate them to the high level Russian rhetoric. It is an undeniable fact that, although the summit's final declaration postponed the start of the Action Plan for the accesison of Ukraine and Georgia, depending on the elections in both states and on the US presidential elections in particular, the same declaration settled by Article 23 that the allies "agreed today that these states would become NATO members." And I am leaving aside the fact that neither in Madrid nor in Washington had Romania got a similar arrangement. But only those who don't know how many times and how explicitly did Russia oppose the idea that any former Soviet republic should join NATO and how many times it expressed such interdiction for Ukraine and Georgia with no euphemism can't realize that Article 23 is the expression of an blistering defeat for Moscow and for Mr. Vladimir Putin personally. The latter official's statements in Bucharest and Soci avoided skilfully any overt reference to this very conflictual aspect, giving the impression, but only the impression that postponement is one and the same with refusal and that the decision making officials in Russia were the ones who decided instead of NATO on the fate of sovereign Ukraine and Georgia. Even if subtlely developed on the use of US techniques of political marketing, the agitprop is still the agitprop. The trush is that, apart from the US President's vain aspirations to grandeur, the high level reunion in Bucharest marked the Alliance's significant progress with the consolidation of its approach to the East and the Southeast. Important to Romania and Poland in particular, the nATO arrangement concerning Ukraine is the true bankruptcy of the famous secret annex of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Let us remember: given this infamous document, the URSS interests in the region between the Baltic Sea and Dardanele and the Bosphorus were more favoured than ever before in the history of the Empire mastered by Peter the Great. But unlike the Baltic Sea Soviet republics, never recognized as such by the great powers, the complete access of the USSR to the mouths of the Danube and the Black Sea was recognized by the Allied. It is the first time after the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union, when right in Bucharest, which shared with Warsaw the sad privilege to be the capitals of those states most harmed by this pact, NATO has truly taken responsibility for such control. If we also consider the fact that the Alliance will soon be represented on both coasts of the Balkan Peninsula, from north to south - after Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria, once with the accession of Albania and Croatia and also of Montenegro in the future, the whole easter side of the Adriatic Sea will be under NATO's direct control - we can say the Bucharest summit overthrew that configuration of power shaped at the end of World War II. It trully sent Russia back to the status it had in the interwar epoch. No matter how many pheromones of power President Putin should spread in the air, if this is victory, I am wondering how would defeat look like.

Zoe PETRE