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According to the Levada polling agency, Putin's personal approval rate remains at 67%, but this number has fallen sharply since last April, when 82% of Russians approved the president's work.
Putin won his last six-year term in March, thus securing his power control until the next elections in 2024. However, Russia's economy remains at a slower pace, with a growth rate of About 2.5%.
It is this slow growth and a lack of growing political control that has led McDowell to suggest that the influence of the Kremlin on the vast country could diminish. The analyst further suggested that Putin's "vertical of power", in which there is a direct chain of command up to the regional governors, will soon no longer be viable.
McDowell said that while a truly federal Russia looks unlikely, it is easy to imagine that more powers are being extended to political and commercial networks based in Siberia and the Far East, where they can be financed independently by oil and minerals.
"If the regions can muster the necessary force to conclude a new contract with the center, then we will be able to ask ourselves what their priorities are afterwards and what competence they can be to achieve them," he said, before Add: "difficult to answer at the moment, but it's a possible future."
McDowell said in a September note that, if Putin's power diminishes in Russia, then "the environment of investment and exploitation will become more and more fragmented between different regions".
The analyst said investors looking to do business in the country should look beyond the Kremlin and form new relationships with the elites and governors of the region.
On the subject of Putin's possible succession, Mr. McDowell stated that the intention was that there was no obvious candidate at this stage who could disrupt his image as the only man for the post.
"Even when we're talking about potential candidates, we're still in the early stages, it's not like Obama (Barack) in 2005 when we could say," Oh, that's a guy who could make. "Nobody has set up his stalls."
