Russia’s Far East covers 40% of the country, yet its population is collapsing at a rate. Once built up by Soviet incentives, the region is now being emptied by economic decline, war, and migration. As Moscow struggles to hold people in one of the world’s resource-rich territories, China and North Korea are expanding their influence. This video explores why Putin calls the crisis a security threat, and how the Russian Far East could reshape geopolitics
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00:00Russia is the largest country on Earth. Its territory spans 11 time zones, two continents, and 6.6 million square
00:07miles of land.
00:09That's 70% larger than the US. But right now, a chunk of it the size of Australia is quietly
00:15being lost, not to military defeat or an invasion.
00:18People are leaving, and they're not coming back.
00:21This is all about the Russian Far East, or more specifically, the Far Eastern Federal District, which covers 40%
00:28of Russia's entire territory.
00:30That entire span of land is only 8 million people, just over 5% of Russia's total population.
00:36And the number is falling faster than it has at any point in modern Russian history, faster than anywhere else
00:42in the country except the far north.
00:44Russian President Vladimir Putin has personally described this as a threat to national security, and he's right.
00:50The region is vital, not only for resources, but also as an entry point for commerce and demographic migration from
00:57the east.
00:57But there's one big problem. As soon as the Kremlin tries to do something about it, the effort fails, and
01:03the Russian Far East continues to decline slowly.
01:06And this creates the possibility of another incursion, this time by China into Russia, a historic reversal of the Russian
01:13Empire's gains in 1860.
01:15But we don't have to go exactly that far back to demonstrate the scale of what's happening.
01:19We only have to go as far back as the collapse of the Soviet Union.
01:23According to the 1989 census, what would become the Far Eastern Federal District had around 10.35 million people.
01:31When Putin came to power, that number was around 8.8 million.
01:35In 2025, the population was estimated at only 7.86 million.
01:40That's about a 25% loss over 35 years.
01:43But that top-line figure obscures how catastrophic the situation is in specific regions.
01:49Chukotka, the remote peninsula of Russia's far northeast, has lost 68% of its population since 1991.
01:56Magadan Oblast, once a hub of Soviet-era resource extraction, has lost 63.6%.
02:02Kamchatka is down 34.6%.
02:05These numbers indicate that the respective regions are essentially being abandoned, with no one to return.
02:11In fact, since Putin came into power, the population dropped by 10%.
02:16And some statistics suggest another 8% declined by 2033.
02:21This was three times the official estimate made just a few years earlier.
02:25And the rate of collapse is accelerating.
02:27The region today holds fewer people than it did in the mid-1970s.
02:31The Soviet state spent decades and enormous resources building the population up.
02:36In the three decades since, that work has been undone almost entirely.
02:40To understand why this is happening, let's go back to the broken Soviet model that Moscow has been trying and
02:46failing to replicate ever since.
02:48The USSR populated the Far East through a combination of methods, some of them deeply coercive.
02:54Gulag labor built the infrastructure of the early Soviet Far East, particularly in the northeast.
03:00But the post-Stalin model relied on positive incentives.
03:03Wages in the region were 50% to two times higher than the national average.
03:07Workers who came east were guaranteed the right to housing in their home regions, which was a critical safety net
03:13in the Soviet housing system.
03:15The accumulated savings from the higher wages and relatively low cost of living essentially meant that the Far East was
03:21framed as a temporary sacrifice with a guaranteed future payoff back west, where life was easier due to higher population
03:28density, better access to infrastructure, and a more favorable climate.
03:32That system worked, even if it encountered setbacks, because it was direct.
03:37The state provided the incentives, the state controlled the institutional guarantees, and the state funded the social infrastructure that made
03:44harsh conditions bearable.
03:46Net migration to the region was positive right up until the late 1980s.
03:50Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it, those foundational guarantees vanished almost overnight.
03:56Workers who had spent years in the east suddenly had no guaranteed housing rights back home, and the savings had
04:02been wiped out by inflation and the implosion of the financial system.
04:06The rational response was to leave immediately, while leaving was still possible.
04:10And that's exactly what they did.
04:12In 1991, for the first time in Soviet or Russian history, out-migration from the Far East exceeded natural population
04:19growth.
04:20But the exodus has never stopped.
04:22What makes the situation so difficult to reverse is that the reasons people leave today are not the same as
04:27the reasons they left in 1991.
04:30Back then, it was institutional collapse and financial panic.
04:34Today, it's a rational cost-benefit calculation, where life in the Russian Far East is expensive, hard, dangerous, and comparatively
04:41unrewarding, and it's only getting worse.
04:44Let's start with the income axis.
04:46In the mid-1990s, wages in the Far East still carried a real premium over the national average, nominally around
04:5371% higher, owing to Soviet-era coefficients and allowances that partially survived the transition.
04:59By the late 2010s, that advantage had dropped to just 18%.
05:03At the same time, the cost of living in the region remained dramatically higher than in Western Russia, 25%
05:09to 30% higher in the more accessible southern cities like Khabarovsk and Vladivostok.
05:1440% to 60% higher in places like Kamchatka and Sakhalin, and up to 80% to 100%
05:20higher in Chukotka.
05:22The arithmetic is straightforward.
05:24You earn marginally more, you pay substantially more.
05:27And the gap between what your wages are worth in the Far East versus what they would be worth in
05:31Novosibirsk or Moscow keeps narrowing.
05:34Then there's the quality of life.
05:36Life expectancy in the Far East lags two to three years behind the national average, which is itself not impressive.
05:42Crime rates are higher than the rest of Russia.
05:45The poverty rate sits at 15.7% in the FEFD, compared to 12.6% nationally.
05:51Healthcare has been consolidated away from small settlements, making it functionally inaccessible to many people in the region.
05:58By 2015, the number of students in sub-sub-regions had fallen to just 25% to 30% of
06:041990 levels.
06:05And the system's response was to shut schools, which then drove more families out, creating a positive feedback loop with
06:12extremely negative results.
06:14So, the people who are on the fence and have the means to leave look at the worsening state and
06:19decide to take their chances elsewhere.
06:21The people who stay are disproportionately older, poorer, and more dependent on state transfers.
06:27This translates into a shrinking tax base, where the local budgets are increasingly used to support the aging population with
06:33healthcare and social services, rather than education and youth empowerment.
06:38Once again, the next cohort of young people makes the same decision as the first, leading to the same outcome,
06:44only slightly worse.
06:45As mentioned, Moscow is aware of the problem, and Putin has called it a national security threat for years.
06:52The Russian state has launched programs to fix that, but neither of them seems to have worked so far.
06:57The Soviet-era development program for the Far East was first written in 1987.
07:02It's been revised, updated, renamed, and relaunched repeatedly in 1996, 2002, and even in the 2015 wave of institutional innovations,
07:12including territories of advanced development, the free port of Vladivostok, free land giveaways, preferential energy tariffs, and subsidized airfares.
07:21This culminated in the April 2026 ministry meeting on the demographic policy strategy of the Far East.
07:28But 30 years of programs ultimately boiled down to the same issue.
07:33The model itself no longer works, and the researchers of the Economic Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences
07:39published their findings back in 2021,
07:42five years before the final wave of incentives.
07:45The free land program is the perfect example of why the system doesn't work.
07:49The Kremlin offered hectares of land in the Far East to residents for free.
07:53The problem is that much of that land was offered without roads connecting it to anything, without rail access, without
07:59any infrastructure that would make it usable or livable.
08:02Then there were wages.
08:04Russia had normally increased wages for certain categories of workers, but Moscow had repeatedly failed to pay them on time.
08:11So the workers should get higher wages, but they end up being delayed or cancelled to the point where it's
08:16uncertain if there was an increase in the first place.
08:18There were even some grand schemes, including proposals to build entirely new millionaire cities to concentrate and anchor the Far
08:25Eastern population.
08:26But these never got beyond the announcement phase simply because there's no budget for building an entire city.
08:32And if there was a budget in place, it disappeared when Russia ended up invading Ukraine in 2022, directing its
08:39resources toward what was supposed to be a 10-day war.
08:42In fact, the war has affected the Far East on multiple fronts.
08:46The most direct impact is mobilization, since the campaign in Ukraine has drawn disproportionately from regions that were already labor
08:53-scarce, and the Far East is among the hardest hit.
08:57Working-age men are the demographic most needed to sustain any kind of economic activity in a region that already
09:03can't find enough workers, and yet they've been mobilized, killed, wounded, or even fled to avoid conscription.
09:08The war has also devastated the budget, as Russia's defense spending has crowded out everything else, with infrastructure being the
09:16most visible casualty.
09:17Roads are not being built.
09:19Rail expansion projects that Russian planners were discussing as recently as 2023 are stalled.
09:25And the aviation network that connects isolated Far Eastern communities from each other and Russia's Western regions is degrading,
09:32as sanctions cut Russia's aviation industry off from Western parts and expertise.
09:37In late 2023, Russia originally proposed a plan to build 1,000 aircraft for domestic and international flights by 2030.
09:46By 2025, the number of planes built was 13, and the plan was quietly shelved.
09:52But perhaps the biggest factor in how the Far East is being lost is that Russia's neighbors are slowly beginning
09:57to convert the region.
09:59Now, just a quick reminder that if you want analyses like these, make sure to subscribe to The Military Show.
10:05We post daily videos on geopolitics and warfare, so you know what happens as soon as it does.
10:11Back to the Far East.
10:12China has been moving into the region for years, and the Ukraine war has accelerated the process dramatically.
10:18Moscow now needs Beijing far more than Beijing needs Moscow, and the price of that dependent is being paid in
10:24the Far East.
10:26By 2025, Chinese investment in the Far Eastern Federal District is projected to approach 1 trillion rubles, or about $13
10:33.5 billion.
10:35Trade volumes between the Khabarovs territory and China grew by 5.5 million tons in 2024, and are by another
10:4236% in just the first six months of 2025.
10:46China is essentially absorbing the entire economy of the Far East, following what should be inter-federation trade to itself.
10:53But there's an even more important factor here.
10:56Population.
10:57An estimated half a million Chinese citizens now live between Vladivostok and the Urals.
11:02The number is growing, facilitated by visa-free arrangements and preferential access to Russia's own territories of advanced development,
11:09the economic zones Moscow created to attract investment and retain population,
11:14which have turned out to be more effective at drawing in Chinese workers than at keeping Russian ones.
11:19In several cities and localities in the Far East, Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service has reported that enclaves have formed where
11:27Russians are practically absent from the workforce.
11:29And remember, the Russians who actually live in the Far East weren't originally from the Far East.
11:34They aren't minorities who were used to living in Siberia, but were relocated there by the Soviet Union on the
11:40promise that their work would yield more money.
11:42They're culturally more similar to Western Russia than the indigenous population.
11:46And that population actually has closer ties to Mongolia or China already,
11:50though that has not necessarily made it more accepting of the new wave of immigrants.
11:55China's government arguably has the same interest in mind.
11:58Remember before 1860, Outer Manchuria was part of Qing, China.
12:03And China hasn't really forgotten that tidbit of historical context.
12:06In previous years, China went so far as to label Russian cities in the region with their previous Chinese names.
12:12Of course, that's not an indicator that China is suddenly going to invade to take back what it lost a
12:17century and a half ago.
12:19But maybe it doesn't need to invade anyway, given that the local population is already being strained by Russia's economic
12:25policies
12:25and unequaled treatment by mobilization and wartime interests.
12:29To counter that, Russia decided to use an unorthodox and possibly self-destructive tactic,
12:35replacing Russians with a different type of Eastern Asians.
12:38To fill the labor shortage in the Far East, Moscow has turned to Pyongyang.
12:42The arrangement is straightforward.
12:44Over 15,000 North Korean workers officially arrived in Russia in 2024 and early 2025,
12:51and most of them are in the Far East, since that's where they're needed and closest to their home country.
12:56Unofficial estimates put the actual number closer to 50,000 by the end of 2025,
13:01and Russian companies operating in the region have already submitted requests for an additional 153,000 North Korean labor contracts.
13:09The demand is also not slowing down, and is demonstrated by the fact that many North Koreans describe their contracts
13:16as closer to slavery,
13:17with 18-hour work shifts and only two days off per year.
13:20The structure of the arrangement tells you everything about who's benefiting.
13:24North Korean workers receive wages at roughly the minimum level permissible under whatever contractual framework applies.
13:31The difference between what Russian companies pay and what those workers actually receive flows to Pyongyang,
13:36which is one of the Kim Jong-un's regime's most significant sources of hard currency.
13:41This is one reason North Korea has every incentive to keep the arrangement running on its current terms,
13:47and no incentive to renegotiate in Moscow's favor.
13:50The result is that two nuclear-armed states are simultaneously entrenching themselves in Russian territory,
13:56using different instruments but achieving the same strategic outcome,
13:59a growing and deepening presence in a region that Moscow can't adequately staff, fund, or govern with its own population.
14:07Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service has framed this as Moscow paying for the war with its own territory,
14:12yet another gamble for trying to win the war and achieve some level of domestic stability that Putin imploded with
14:18his own efforts.
14:20There's also another dimension here that receives relatively little coverage in the West,
14:24partly because it sounds extreme, and partly because it's still at an early stage.
14:28The political consequences inside Russia of the Far East demographic collapse.
14:33As ethnic Russians leave, the demographic composition of the region is shifting.
14:38In some cities in the Far East, the combined Chinese and Uzbek populations are now on par with Russians.
14:44Russian activists, including some with organized platforms,
14:47have begun publicly discussing the concept of an independent Siberia,
14:51sometimes invoking the phrase United States of Siberia,
14:54that originally began as an art movement, but translated to a political and cultural identity.
14:59These are still fringe conversations today, but consider the greater context.
15:04Putin has spent the last 25 years in office, trying to curb any form of national identity that isn't distinctly
15:10Russia first,
15:11even going so far as to erode the independence of former Soviet states to keep them connected to the federation.
15:17The fact that there's yet another possible separatist movement,
15:20this time for a region where Moscow has the lowest chance of interfering due to sheer distance and lack of
15:25institutions and infrastructure,
15:27means that internal Russian politics are on the brink of collapse.
15:30Of course, the activists are currently directing their efforts from abroad,
15:34as they were among the first to leave Russia at the start of the war in Ukraine.
15:38But if Putin's government shows any sign of weakness,
15:41the local population might start seeing through the state-funded propaganda and join ranks.
15:45So, we're left with an area that rivals the world's largest countries,
15:50sitting atop the world's largest reserves of timber, fish, rare earth elements, diamonds, gold and hydrocarbon deposits,
15:57bordering China, Japan and North Korea, and almost touching Alaska across the Bering Strait.
16:02Putin can't seem to make Russians want to stay there,
16:05and the native population is slowly being supplanted by the Chinese or Koreans.
16:10Over the next century, the wealth of untapped resources and the geopolitical ramifications,
16:15or being so close to other world powers, will become increasingly significant.
16:19The question will become, who will actually be there, running the economy, filling the towns,
16:24extracting the resources, and deciding whose interests are served?
16:28Moscow presents itself as a great power, reasserting control over its near abroad,
16:33pushing back against Western encirclement, and projecting strength in Ukraine and beyond.
16:38But it can't hold its own territory by the simplest and most fundamental measure of territorial control,
16:44keeping its own people there.
16:45Russia isn't actually going to lose the Far East tomorrow, or in the next election,
16:50and there's not going to be an uprising to secede from the federation anytime soon.
16:54But make no mistake, the Russian Far East is, slowly and steadily,
16:58transitioning from Russian demographic dominance to something else.
17:01No border changes are imminent.
17:04All the forces driving the demographic collapse are driving the economic collapse,
17:08and are self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing.
17:11The on-the-ground reality of who lives there, works there, builds there,
17:15and benefits from the resources there, is shifting as it has been for decades.
17:19Putin sees it.
17:21Russian researchers have been documenting it for a generation.
17:24The programs have failed.
17:26The war has made it worse, and it's getting far less likely that the trend reverses.
17:30And the Far East is only the start of China's plans for Russia.
17:34To learn more, check out this video.
17:37And to stay up to date with the most recent developments on global geopolitics and warfare,
17:41make sure to hit the bell and subscribe to The Military Show.
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