BTW here is a rather interesting web of interconnecting links between royal and non-royal Romanovs and some of Putin's ancestors:
According to recent studies into Putin's genealogy, one of Putin's earliest ancestors, the peasant Yakim Nikitin lived in a village called Bordino (in Tverskaya Gouvernement / Oblast, Kalininskiy Rayon) before 1677, as a serf of the boyar Nikita Ivanovich Romanov, first cousin of Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov. When Nikita Ivanovich Romanov died childless in 1654, his estates (and serfs) reverted to the Crown (Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich). Tsar Fyodor Alexeyevich III gave them to his mother-in-law Domna Apraxina. They were then in turn inherited by successive Counts Apraxin untill her great-granddaughter Countess Yelena Alexandrovna Apraxina married Peter the Great's cousin Alexander Lvovich Naryshkin. In 1760 their daughter Agrefena Alexandrovna Naryshkina married Nikolay Ivanovich Neplyouyev (Неплюев) and the estates stayed with the Neplyouyevs untill the Revolution.
They were distant cousins, or rather collateral descendants of the ancestor of the Romanovs, being descended from 14th-century boyar Andrey Ivanovich Kobyla (= Mare), also the first known ancestor of the Romanovs. Their surname means "no spitting" and is derived from a nickname of a great-great grandson of Andrey Kobyla.