MOSCOW, May 15 (RIA Novosti) - An oil-product exchange will start operating in Russia by the end of 2006, a deputy economics minister said Monday.

In his state of the nation address on May 10, President Putin said Russia, as a leading world oil exporter, had to set up its own oil exchange to trade crude and petroleum products for rubles.

Kirill Androsov, the chairman of a government task force on launching oil and petroleum product-traded exchanges, was upbeat about the timeframe for opening the bourse: "The oil-products exchange will open by the end of the year."

Androsov said that although work was being conducted in parallel, it was easier to organize an exchange for petroleum products rather than export oil as there were many buyers and that state purchases could boost the process.

The deputy economics minister said Russia could set up an exchange to trade in oil export by the end of 2007.