It doesn't matter whether Russia is better than it's neighbours today. The Russian death rate has exceeded births in every year since 1990 to the point that by 2040 there will be more Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash and Chechen males between 16 and 30 than Russians, which means that any seperatist movement will succeed because Moscow will run out of troops before anyone else. Oh yeah and each of those would outman Russians individually.
By 2040 this will also be true of Uzbekistan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Czechia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, Sweden, France and Germany. By 2040 Russia would be guaranteed to lose a 1v1 war against any of them. Putin's government has spent twenty years trying to fix this by Russifying the other ethnicities of Russia so they integrate and up the numbers on the side of "ethnic Russians" but the State Department and CIA are too hard to beat and have managed to keep Chechnya Chechen and so on. They have a plan B involving climate change but they don't have the GDP to pull it off, thanks to the USA.
The only way that Russia will survive is if none of those groups decide to militarise and attack Russia, which anybody familiar with the history of Eurasia can tell you is very long odds. France went from peaceful to sieging Moscow in seventeen years. Germany went from peaceful to sieging the entire European section of Russia in eight years, assuming you take 1933 as the last chance to avert WW2. Historically, the turn around from peace to war with the Uzbeks, Turks and Swedes is less than five years.
