China Invades Russia

Disclaimer: This newsletter, Counterfactual Geopolitics, is not a prediction, just a mental exercise. This series is meant to explore how the world might evolve if one domino falls a little differently. Any resemblance to actual coups, invasions, or geopolitical backstabbing is purely coincidental.

In early 2026, intelligence leaks began circulating that the United States and China had engaged in secret negotiations regarding the future of Russia. What had started as informal talks about Arctic access and energy competition escalated into a full-fledged military plan: a coordinated invasion of the Russian Federation, with Beijing and Washington working together to dismantle what remained of Moscow’s grip over its vast and resource-rich territory. By 2027, the war was underway.

The initial justification for the invasion was framed around Russian instability and long-term territorial disputes between China and Russia in the southern regions of Russia. Following years of economic sanctions, internal unrest, and military overextension in Ukraine, Russia had begun to fracture.

By late 2026, the writing was on the wall. Following failed negotiations, continued Russian military defeats in Ukraine, economic stagnation, and growing domestic unrest meant Putin was running out of options.

Several regions, including the Far East and parts of the Caucasus, were openly resisting Moscow’s control, partially through disinformation tactics employed by Chinese and North Korean proxy actors.

A failed assassination attempt on Vladimir Putin in mid-2026, widely believed to have been orchestrated by factions within the Russian security services, though likely funded by foreign interests, further weakened the Kremlin’s ability to maintain order. Putin retreated into obscurity following it, only showing up to occasional photo opportunities, and always using his body double. The power vacuum left key natural resources and nuclear stockpiles dangerously unguarded.

Though he purportedly survived, the attack shattered his inner circle. A quiet but ruthless power struggle erupted within the Kremlin, with factions from the FSB (Federal Security Service), the GRU (military intelligence), and oligarch-backed political elites maneuvering to either replace Putin or reassert their influence. The average Moskovian were found honestly asking one another, “who is in charge?”

At some point he, and his double, disappeared from public view altogether. Whether he was officially dispatched in an underground palace coup or quietly "retired" to a heavily guarded dacha in the Urals remains unclear. Some reports suggested he attempted to flee to Iran or North Korea, even though Kim Jung Un was working with the Chinese. If he ever made it out of Russia, no evidence of his whereabouts emerged. More likely, he was either placed under house arrest by his own intelligence services or assassinated by a yet unnamed but ambitious successor.

The biggest obstacle to a U.S.-China invasion was, of course, Russia’s nuclear arsenal, one of the largest in the world. If even a fraction of Russia’s 6,000 warheads were launched, the entire operation would end in catastrophe. Avoiding nuclear war required a combination of deception, sabotage, influence and overwhelming force.

In the months leading up to the invasion, China played the long game. Using its deep economic and intelligence ties within Russia, Beijing infiltrated key elements of Russia’s strategic forces. The Chinese had spent years embedding their influence in Russian infrastructure, quietly recruiting disillusioned military officers and offering them financial incentives in exchange for cooperation, as well as planting well-placed explosives, electronic warfare, and cyber weapons to render equipment inoperable. These back-channel efforts ensured that when the invasion began, many Russian nuclear command sites were already compromised or rendered inoperative.

The U.S., working with NATO and Israeli intelligence, conducted simultaneous cyber operations targeting Russian early-warning and missile launch systems. A coordinated wave of cyberattacks and low-yield kinetic warfare, disabled large portions of Russia’s command-and-control network. At the same time, NATO special forces launched a series of lightning raids on critical nuclear storage sites, using intelligence gathered from defectors and high-altitude reconnaissance drones/satellites.

The most dangerous moment came when a rogue faction of the Russian military attempted to launch a preemptive nuclear strike. However, due to sabotage efforts - including corrupted launch codes, disabled communication lines, and key officers defecting at the last moment - the attack never materialized. China’s elite cyber warfare units played a crucial role in jamming missile silos in Siberia, ensuring that no significant nuclear retaliation was possible.

By the time Russian forces realized the extent of the infiltration, it was too late. The country’s nuclear arsenal had been effectively neutralized. Within weeks of the invasion, U.S. and Chinese task forces secured nearly all known nuclear sites. Some warheads went missing in the chaos, sparking fears of a black-market arms race, but most were either deactivated or placed under joint U.S.-China control.

Russia’s stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons posed another major threat. But unlike nuclear weapons, these were more decentralized and harder to track. In the months leading up to the invasion, defectors within the Russian military tipped off Western intelligence agencies to the locations of key bioweapons research facilities. U.S. and covertly flagged NATO forces, using a combination of drone strikes and special operations raids, destroyed or secured many of these sites before Russian forces could use them.

However, in the chaos of war, some stockpiles inevitably fell into the wrong hands. Several known bioweapons facilities in the Caucasus and Central Asia were looted, with intelligence reports suggesting that some agents and deadly pathogens were smuggled out by rogue actors - possibly to Hezbollah operatives in Iran. The fear of bioterrorism remained an enduring consequence of the war, with both the U.S. and China investing heavily in containment and countermeasures.

For China, the primary objective was securing Siberia’s vast reserves of oil, gas, and minerals and additional ports along the Western Pacific near Alaska. Beijing had long eyed the underpopulated Russian Far East as a natural extension of its economic sphere. The Chinese military moved quickly, launching a coordinated assault in August 2027 under the pretense of "securing regional stability."

China’s strategy was not purely military, it was also psychological and economic. For years leading up to the invasion, Beijing had been positioning itself as Russia’s indispensable partner. China bought up vast amounts of Russian oil and gas, kept the Russian economy afloat with trade deals, and embedded itself in key industries, from technology to rare-earth mining. This economic dependency allowed China to exert quiet leverage over Russian elites.? China also bought much of the economic powerhouses, under the guise of bailouts, and good business – while secretly giving them great strategic positioning to invade without large losses of life.

By the time the war began, China had already sown distrust within Russia’s power structure. Many high-ranking Russian officials were more loyal to their personal bank accounts—often backed by Chinese loans—than to the Russian state. When the invasion started, defections were swift. Entire divisions of the Russian Far East military command either stood down or outright switched sides, allowing China to roll through Siberia with minimal resistance.

At the same time, China engaged in a disinformation campaign designed to confuse and destabilize Russian forces. Fake orders, forged by Chinese cyber units, instructed some Russian battalions to retreat, while others were sent on wild goose chases to nonexistent battlefronts. The result was mass confusion, leaving Moscow unable to coordinate an effective defense.

Within weeks, the People’s Liberation Army had occupied key cities including Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, meeting only sporadic resistance from overstretched and unmotivated Russian garrisons.?

Simultaneously, NATO forces, led by the United States, launched their own offensive from the West. With a blitzkrieg-style push through Belarus and Kaliningrad, American and European forces rapidly dismantled Russian defensive lines. Poland, eager to erase centuries of Russian influence, provided significant logistical and manpower support. By the winter of 2027, Moscow was under siege from two sides.

The Russian military, already depleted from years of attrition in Ukraine and economic strangulation, collapsed in key areas. However, scattered resistance emerged, particularly in regions fiercely loyal to Putin’s government. Russian nationalist militias and remnants of the Wagner Group engaged in guerrilla warfare, especially against the Chinese incursion.

As Moscow fell in early 2028, a provisional division of Russian territory took shape. China absorbed much of Siberia and the Russian Far East, incorporating it into a newly formed “Siberian Autonomous Region.” The U.S. and NATO forces, meanwhile, worked to install a pro-Western government in Moscow, fragmenting Russia into several smaller republics. St. Petersburg, long a European-leaning city, became the capital of a Western-aligned Russian Federation, while the Ural and Central Asian regions fell into varying degrees of Chinese economic influence. Loss of life was in the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and the entire conflict lasted less than a month.

The United States sued for peace in the Russian/Ukrainian conflict. The now vastly constricted Russia called for a general election, largely of pro-western candidates, ultimately settling on a premier of Ukrainian decent who called for immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine and northern Africa in exchange for a lifting of western sanctions.

The most surprising aspect of the war was NATO’s decision not to enter the war as an overt belligerent until late in the conflict, content on only covert actions in support of the United States. While the West had spent decades warning against Russian aggression, it had little appetite for an all-out global conflict until the Russian troops had been largely pacified. The key to NATO’s non-response lay in ostensible desire for diplomacy.

Months before the invasion, secret backroom negotiations between Washington, Brussels, and Beijing ensured that the West would not intervene militarily—so long as certain conditions were met. China agreed to limit its territorial expansion to Siberia and pledged not to annex Moscow or any part of European Russia and to give at least a 10 year pause on any aggression against Taiwan. The U.S., in turn, focused on dismantling Russia’s strategic threat rather than outright occupying its territory.

Furthermore, NATO saw an opportunity: by allowing China to absorb much of Siberia, the West ensured that Beijing would become preoccupied with managing a vast, unwieldy new frontier. Governing millions of resentful ethnic Russians would be an ongoing headache for China, keeping it distracted from more aggressive moves in the South China Sea or Taiwan, with written guarantees to that effect.

By the time the war ended, the world had been fundamentally reshaped. Russia, once a major global player, was no more, largely stripped of its nuclear capability, and cut almost in half, with Ukraine taking large chunks of its territory back including Donbass and Crimea. The U.S. and China, once bitter rivals, had found an uneasy modus vivendi.

The global reaction was swift and unpredictable. India, traditionally balancing between Russia and the West, found itself caught in an uneasy alliance with the U.S., wary of China’s growing dominance. The European Union, initially wary of an all-out war with Russia, ultimately benefited from increased security and access to former Russian energy supplies. However, China’s sudden territorial expansion unnerved Japan and South Korea, leading to a rapid militarization of the Pacific.

Most significantly, Russia as a unified state ceased to exist. The power vacuum left in its wake saw former Soviet states, from Kazakhstan to Georgia, realigning themselves in a world where Moscow was no longer the regional hegemon. Nuclear stockpiles were an ongoing concern, but a joint U.S.-China task force ensured that all known Russian nuclear sites were secured before falling into the hands of rogue factions, with oversight from NATO and Ukrainian forces who found it in their vested interest to ensure the security of those weapons.

Conspiracy theories about Putin being alive continue to drive loyalists who continue mounting sporadic disruptive attacks against the Chinese. The attacks were believed to be driven by Indian disinformation campaigns meant to disrupt Chinese control in the region and have driven the Chinese to begin to round up Russian citizens believed to be involved or still loyal to the former Russian president.

By 2030, the world had permanently shifted. The United States, while still powerful, had fundamentally altered its geopolitical stance, recognizing China as a necessary partner rather than an outright adversary. China, for its part, had gained the vast natural resources it long coveted but now faced growing resistance from ethnic Russians and nationalist insurgents within its newly acquired territories. The war had ended, but the repercussions for China and global trade would continue.