This is the script for my video posted on July 24, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
Siberia makes up over three quarters of Russia’s territory but has only one quarter of its people, and its vast landscape serves as a massive treasury of resources, including oil, palladium, gold, diamonds, and timber. In fact, Siberia is in many ways the reason Russia is considered a great power. So how has Russia’s exploitation of Siberia shaped its geopolitical dynamics?
The Russian conquest of Siberia is traditionally dated to 1582, when a Cossack military leader named Yermak Timofeyevich led a force of about 840 men over the Ural Mountains against the Khanate of Sibir, a Tatar successor of the Golden Horde ruled by descendants of Genghis Khan that is most likely where we get the name Siberia.
Yermak took the khanate's capital in 1582, but its last khan fought on for another sixteen years until it finally collapsed as an organized state. The campaign was financed by the Stroganov merchant family, who wanted to capitalize on the region's resources, particularly sable fur, the most expensive fur in the world.
The Russians advanced into Siberia via the region’s vast network of rivers, building timber forts at river junctions along the way as bases to collect tribute from locals. Cities like Tyumen, Tobolsk, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Yakutsk sprung up for this purpose.
In 1639, after 57 years, Russians finally reached the Sea of Okhotsk on the Pacific Ocean. Their expansion down the Amur River brought them into contact with China under the Qing dynasty. The two clashed along the river in the 1600s, and after losing the sieges of Albazin, Russia signed the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, which pushed it back off the Amur and kept the peace for about 170 years. Then, in 1858 and 1860, a weakened Qing dynasty was pressured into signing away roughly 900 thousand square kilometers of that land to Russia through the treaties of Aigun and Peking, with barely a shot fired. The Amur comprises much of the border between Russia and China today.
The Russians were brutal against the local peoples of Siberia. Tributes of fur were compulsory from the late 16th century to the early 20th, and enforcement often involved coercion, violence, and taking adult males as hostages.
Communities were forced to abandon their traditional subsistence hunting and gathering to meet quotas, which caused starvation, population decline, and wildlife depletion. Today, only about 5% of Siberia’s population is indigenous, and fewer than 10% of these tribal peoples now live traditional nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyles.
For centuries, Siberia has also been associated with punishment. The tsars would exile people there, and the Soviets built gulags whose forced labor was the main tool used to industrialize the region. The largest gulags were placed alongside resources like coal, nickel, and gold.
The far eastern city of Magadan was built on the backs of forced labor. Prisoners built the city itself and the Kolyma Highway, the so-called Road of Bones, to get to it. They were forced to mine gold in the permafrost, and at least 125k prisoners died in the Kolyma camps, with some estimates running several times higher.
In 1891, Tsar Alexander III ordered the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which you’ve probably heard of. The roughly 9300km line was built to project Russian power into East Asia and open Siberia to greater settlement and extraction.
Of course, the Trans-Siberian Railway was vulnerable for several reasons. It was single-tracked, which made it a strategic vulnerability during the Russo-Japanese War, and part of it also ran through Manchuria via the Chinese Eastern Railway, making Russia’s link to the Pacific dependent on a foreign country. This was resolved through the construction of the all-Russian Amur Railway, which completed in 1916.
WWII also changed things for Siberia, because after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, over 1500 large factories were evacuated eastward along with about 16m people. This saved Soviet war production and enabled the eventual out-production of Germany.
In 1974, the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev relaunched construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline, or BAM, a second route from central Siberia to the Pacific, largely for economic reasons. Some stretches had been built decades earlier, partly with Gulag labor. The line was largely completed by 1984. Today the BAM and the Trans-Siberian together, Russia's eastern rail network, move well over 100m tons of coal and other resources a year, with capacity now around 180m tons.
Siberia’s resources are its lifeblood. Most Russian oil and gas is produced in Western Siberia. The Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug alone accounts for 90% of the country’s total natural gas production.
In 2019, Russia’s Power of Siberia 1 pipeline came online, and when it reached full capacity in 2024 it began delivering about 38b cubic meters of natural gas per year to China from fields in eastern Siberia. There’s a second Power of Siberia pipeline in the works but China has yet to finalize the deal due to price disputes.
The Russian company Nornickel, meanwhile, is the world's largest producer of palladium at over 40% of global output, and it produces vast amounts of nickel, platinum, and copper, anchored by its mines around Norilsk in Siberia. Russia is also the world's second-largest gold producer, behind only China, thanks to mines across Siberia.
The Siberian Federal District, which covers much of Siberia's central region, also holds roughly a third of Russia's forests. Illegal logging there is severe, with most of that lumber exported to China.
Siberia’s Lake Baikal is the deepest lake in the world and holds about 20% of global unfrozen fresh water.
But for such vast resources, the population is incredibly scarce. The Siberian Federal District has about 4.36m square kilometers of territory and only 16.5m people, meaning there are on average only about four people per square kilometer. The Far Eastern Federal District covers 40% of Russia’s territory and holds only 8m people, just over 5% of the national population. And these population levels are falling as people migrate to Western Russia.
At the same time, China's three northeastern provinces hold close to 100m people, so the scarce population isn't an innate problem, though those Chinese provinces are themselves shrinking. This imbalance has fueled a narrative that the Chinese are “taking over” the region, partially because Chinese farmers lease Russian farmland through intermediaries, and though there is a growing Chinese economic footprint in eastern Russia, there is no reliable evidence of mass permanent Chinese settlement.
After the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine and its resulting sanctions, Russia was cut off from much of its main energy market in mainland Europe, forcing it to pivot east, above all toward China and India, which together took around 80% of Russia's oil exports in 2025. But this pivot is constrained by physical bottlenecks like rail capacity and pipeline limitations, as well as China’s massive leverage and demand for near-domestic pricing on resources. China is playing the long game while Russia desperately tries to use Siberia to bring in cash.
The war in Ukraine has also had a disproportionate impact on poor Siberians, with republics like Tuva and Buryatia facing the highest per-capita casualties of any region. Based on confirmed deaths, soldiers from Tuva have died at a rate of about 120 for every 10000 adult men, versus Moscow's 3 per 10000. That's around 40x higher. I recommend watching the video I made recently on this topic for more detail.
Meanwhile, the infrastructure used to capitalize on Siberia’s resources was built to operate in permafrost, but climate change is thawing the land, causing things like support pillars to collapse. One 2023 study estimated the damage to Russian infrastructure could run between 115b and 169b USD by 2050, depending on how fast the planet warms, while Russia's own government has put the figure lower, at around 67b. Russian officials say more than 40% of buildings in permafrost zones already show damage.
Then there are the wildfires, which emit massive amounts of CO2 and can smolder underground through winter thanks to the peat beneath the surface.
The climate change aspect of this is a double-edged sword for Siberia though, because warming also opens up the Arctic to navigation and resource exploitation.
Siberia may be Russia’s resource treasury and the physical basis for its status as a great power, but it is also a tremendous liability. Russia struggles to even populate it, let alone develop and defend it, and China has both the historical grievances and the demographic weight to slowly move in and turn the region into an economic vassal. Beijing makes no official claim to the land, but it hasn't forgotten the treaties that took it, and in 2023 its official maps quietly relabeled Vladivostok and other cities with their old Chinese names. The terrain is changing all the time. We'll just have to see how the winds change.
Keep reading
- How does Russia’s Kaliningrad survive surrounded by NATO?
- Why does Russia want Crimea so badly?
- Is Russia weaponizing Russians in the Baltics?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.