AFP, BUCHAREST - European leaders kept Georgia and Ukraine waiting at NATO's doorstep Thursday, dealing George W. Bush a rebuff at the last summit of the transatlantic alliance he will attend as US president.

"Today more nations stepped forward with offers that will raise that total again, and very substantially," NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said at a news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Scheffer did not say how many troops were offered, although a US official spoke of commitments being made by about a dozen countries. But the secretary general said it satisfied a Canadian demand for badly needed reinforcements in its sector in southern Afghanistan.

Despite 11th-hour American arm-twisting, European leaders -- wary of alienating an increasingly assertive Russia -- denied coveted pre-membership status to Georgia and Ukraine, at least for the time being.

By way of consolation, Scheffer said NATO would offer Georgia and Ukraine "intensive engagement", along with a vague promise of membership sometime down the line. "We agree today that these countries will become members of NATO," he told reporters.

"That is quite something." Both former Soviet republics yearn to join the Membership Action Plan, or MAP, which grooms former communist states in eastern European for NATO accession, as a counterfoil to Russian influence.

Making the best of the situation, Georgia's minister for Euro-Atlantic integration, Giorgi Baramidze, said: "The decision has been made to accept us moving toward NATO... We think this is a historic achievement for Georgia."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel attend the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania ©AFP - Eric Feferberg With outgoing Russian President Vladimir Putin set to join the summit on Friday, Moscow's deputy foreign minister Alexander.