What I’d be very interested to know would be what sort of(explicit or tacit) concessions short of being marched into the street and bayonetted to death Putin or his successor might have to end up making to get to stay in place.
It’s my (distinctly layman’s) understanding that the benefits of being Russian Federation federated are…unevenly distributed…with a heavy emphasis on the capital; and of course the system is notorious for the amount of assorted corruption and general till-skimming going on.
That certainly makes things dangerous(since there are restive provinces with legitimate grievances and assorted potential competitors with established tentacle networks busy sucking cash out of different areas of the economy and the state); but it also offers a lot of room for flexibility (and, particularly with the technically illegal wealth extraction side, quiet flexibility) in terms of making concessions to get people who don’t really want to be the new leader with the target on his back enough to fight you for it, but do not like you, on side.
I’d assume that Putin or any post-Putin leader would be loath to formally recognize breakaway regions or the like; but they’d face very little public scrutiny(since even specialist attempts at penetrating the details of where the money goes are often dogged by uncertainty) if they agreed to a sharply reduced cut of various dubiously licit income streams; and could definitely split the difference with at least some would-be secessionists through measures ranging from ‘just look the other way as nominally mandatory regional obligations to the central state go unmet’ to 'as long as you are loyal to me, and don’t say anything stupid about not being part of Russia, you can have your own fiefdom, like Ramzan Kadyrov does".
