President Vladimir Putin’s wide-ranging state of the nation address to parliament has drawn an equally diverse spread of comment in Tuesday’s Russian press.

The two main questions aroused are about Mr Putin’s intention to realize his pledges and the next presidential election, scheduled for 2008.

Some analysts were surprised when Putin turned into severe criticism against bureaucracy as just the biggest obstacle to development of the democratic process and have not dropped a word about the problem of the separation of power and assets and about the mechanism to be implemented for transfer of power in 2008.

Such evasion of the most acute issues caused some drop in confidence.

For instance, analyst Stanislav Belkovsky said on Tuesday that Putin announced the end of his political era in his state-of-the-nation address to parliament.

“The main question in this context is what should be done so that the period of Vladimir Putin’s decline does not end in Russia’s collapse,” Belkovsky concluded.