PLANET Earth may or may not have become a safer place as the result of a Nuclear Summit, which brought the leaders of the world's seven most powerful economies to Moscow over the weekend. But the team working for President Boris Yeltsin's re-election in June are banking that the meeting made him look an impressive statesman, a candidate the Russian electorate would be mad not to return for a second term in the Kremlin.
Russian television, which is more or less openly campaigning on behalf of Mr Yeltsin, on Friday showed the leaders of Canada Japan, France, Britain, Italy Germany and America, the so called G7 states, coming one by one to greet the president in the Kremlin, like foreign ambassadors in past centuries, paying their respects to the Russian tsar.
The message to millions of viewers was that other candidates for the Russian presidency, including the front running communist leader, Gennady Zyuganov, might make promises, but Mr Yeltsin held the whole world in his hand.
The Western leaders might have been conspiring in this attempt to place Mr Yeltsin in an advantageous light, for privately they prefer him to the Communist and Nationalist alternatives. Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany said straight out. "What's bad about that?" when asked whether the summit was backing Mr Yeltsin. He also joked that unlike himself, the Kremlin leader had managed to lose weight, making him fit for the election battle.
But President Bill Clinton, himself facing re-election this year, was more cautious lest Russian voters detect any foreign interference. "The correct position for the United States," he said, "is not to get involved in any direct way in the election campaign it is not right for the United States or any other country to tell people how to vote."
And yesterday, after a one to one meeting with Mr Yeltsin covering Nato expansion, arms control, the war in Chechnya and peace efforts in Bosnia, Mr Clinton made a point of meeting opposition politicians including Mr Zyuganov. However, he drew a line at talking to the extreme nationalist presidential candidate, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who dismissed the G7 as "a gathering of crooks" and said their "summit should go to hell".
Russian voters will draw their own conclusions about Saturday's nuclear summit, which was held to mark the 10th anniversary of the deadly explosion at the Chernobyl atomic power station on April 26th, 1986.
The summit produced fine words. "The end of the cold war and the political and economic reforms in Russia have opened a new era in our relationships," said the communique. "We are committed to giving absolute priority to safety in the use of nuclear energy.
The concrete results were more modest an agreement to co-operate on atomic energy, radioactive waste disposal and prevention of nuclear smuggling and a statement of intent to conclude a nuclear test ban treaty by this September. The Ukrainian president, Leon id Kuchma, invited to attend the last part of the summit, re-stated a commitment to close Chernobyl by the year 2000 after the G7 reiterated the pledge of aid worth $3 billion and promised extra help to reinforce the cracked tomb which encloses the ruined reactor.
The Russian chapter of Greenpeace, wanting more radical measures to save the environment, unfurled huge yellow protest banners all along the river bank beneath the Kremlin.
Speaking at a press conference where he gave a lacklustre performance Mr Yeltsin said it was now important to draw China into the process of nuclear co-operation. At the end of the summit it was decided that Mr Yeltsin, who was due to visit Beijing this week anyway, would put the case of the G7 to Chinese leaders. This is another chance for the man who suffered two heart attacks last year to show himself a vigorous player on the world stage.
However, the more sophisticated Russian voters will not have missed the fact that, while the Russian media spoke repeatedly about the Group of Eight, the G7 have not yet admitted Russian fully to their club because of the country's continuing economic weakness.
Other voters are less interested in foreign affairs and by election day on June 16th will have forgotten the summit, if they took much notice of it in the first place. They are more concerned with domestic problems, especially the draining war in Chechnya.
The ambush of a Russian convoy by a band of Chechen rebels last week was further evidence that Mr Yeltsin's peace plan is not working. G7 leaders tactfully swept Chechnya under the carpet But it is on Chechnya rather than nuclear safety that Mr Yeltsin will be judged by his own people.