RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual state of the nation speech today, dividing it between vague pledges to improve living standards, pensions and housing and boasting of a new generation of undetectable strategic nuclear weapons.

He claimed that his country had achieved a technological breakthrough that could dramatically boost its military capability and global standing.

President Putin said that Russia’s new weapons include a nuclear-powered cruise missile, a nuclear-powered underwater drone and new hypersonic missiles that have no equivalent elsewhere in the world.

These weapons have made US-supplied missile defence shields “useless," he claimed, and mean an effective end to Western efforts to stymie the country’s development.

He noted that Russia had been compelled to develop new weapons since Washington has developed a missile defence system that threatened to undermine the Russian nuclear deterrent and ignored Moscow’s concerns about it.

“No-one has listened to us. You listen to us now,” he said.

Mr Putin faces election challenges on March 18, but his total domination of state and media resources makes it all but impossible for him to lose.

Despite this, his state of the nation speech, doubling as his election manifesto, promises to “expand freedom in all spheres and strengthen institutions of democracy, local government, structures of civil society and courts.”

The president said it was the government’s duty to improve living conditions for the elderly and a programme of systematic support should be developed to achieve this.

“Our duty is to support the older generation. Elderly people must have decent conditions for their lives and we must increase pensions. They need to be regularly indexed and higher than the level of inflation,” he suggested.

Mr Putin also spoke of modernising the country’s infrastructure, doubling expenditure to transform towns and cities and spending 11 trillion roubles (£145 billion) on the road network.

• Challengers for the presidency include Russia’s largest strawberry grower Pavel Grudinin, proposed by the Communist Party, veteran extreme nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, former favourite of the West Grigory Yavlinsky, businessman Boris Titov, who works closely with the president, Sergei Baburin, another Putin courtier, and Ksenia Sobchak, daughter of the president’s late political mentor Anatoly Sobchak.