For more than 25 years, the great fear of many Russian national security strategists has been the increasing vulnerability Moscow faces vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Nowhere is that anxiety more pronounced than in the Russian Far East and Pacific coast regions.

That region is home to a number of strategic industries, including the massive Komsomolsk-na-Amure aviation production plant that manufactures the most advanced Sukhoi fighter aircraft, most notably the Su-35 and Su-57.

The PRC has already purchased the first of those two models. The second is loaded with technologies and on-board systems that Beijing would like to have.

Therefore, Moscow’s “China nightmare” has been, for years, that as Russia’s population in the East continues to decline and its economic prowess declines, the combined weakness could prompt the PRC to begin seizing some of the most valuable areas of that territory. According to a classified document leaked from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) earlier this year, even Russian President Vladimir Putin fears that Beijing is already “trying to encroach” on this territory.

The document, which was leaked to the New York Times, was described as providing “the most detailed behind-the-scenes view to date of Russian counterintelligence’s thinking about China” and describes “a ‘tense and dynamically developing’ intelligence battle in the shadows between the two outwardly friendly nations.”

The nightmare is now coming close to becoming a reality—a very bad daydream.

On December 14, NetEase, one of China’s largest media platforms and officially listed with hundreds of millions of users, published an article with a headline that telegraphed intentions Russia has long feared. “China Must Prepare for the Worst: If Russia Collapses, This 7 Million Square Kilometer Territory Must Not Be Lost” is the title of the Chinese-language article.

The subject, of course, is Russia’s Far East. The irony is that the PRC is the very nation that Putin so defiantly “pivoted” to in the wake of Western sanctions after his invasion of Ukraine.

And it is that same nation he was counting on to evade Western sanctions that is now talking openly about beginning to devour one of the most strategically important regions that he rules over.

The Chinese authors do not even attempt to clothe Beijing’s ambitions in any diplomatic or circuitous language. The Far East is like a “chicken rib” for Russia, they write, an enormous but useless region, because “there’s no money for development, no people, and the war in the west is draining the last resources.”

For China, however, it’s a “treasure”—teeming with gold, diamonds, oil, gas, and timber. In other words, everything Beijing desperately needs.

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