Izhevsk
Izhevsk is Russia's inland arsenal node: 618,776 residents, over 2,500 Garpiya drones produced in one year at Kupol, and a metalworking path that now attracts strikes.
Izhevsk still gets paid to do what it learned in the eighteenth century: turn metalworking into weapons output. The city sits 155 metres above sea level on the Izh River, serves as the capital of Udmurtia, and had 618,776 residents on 1 January 2024. In 2025 it marks 265 years since the ironworks that founded it. What looks like heritage branding is still live industrial logic.
Path dependence explains why. Izhevsk started as an ironworks in 1760, became an imperial armaments centre, then a Soviet machine-building city, and still houses plants whose production matters far beyond Udmurtia. European intelligence documents reviewed by Reuters said the Izhevsk-based Kupol plant produced more than 2,500 Garpiya-A1 attack drones between July 2023 and July 2024. TASS, citing Kalashnikov's press service, said the Izhevsk Unmanned Systems subsidiary planned to increase output tenfold in 2024 after opening a 5,800-square-metre workshop and adding 360 jobs.
That is the Wikipedia gap. Many industrial cities keep factory heritage as memory after the heavy industry leaves. Izhevsk still uses the old industrial skeleton for active orders. Resource allocation explains the persistence: once state money, skilled labour, testing capacity, and supplier habits are concentrated in one place, the quickest way to expand output is to thicken the same node again. The cost is that the city stops behaving like a rear area. Drone strikes on the Kupol plant on November 17, 2024 and July 1, 2025 showed that a factory city roughly 1,300 kilometres from Ukraine can become part of the active battlespace when it manufactures air-defence systems and drones.
The biological parallel is the termite mound. A mound looks inert from the outside, but inside it is a specialised production and defence system built by repeated additions over long stretches of time. Izhevsk works the same way. Phase transitions explain how a city known for engineering becomes a direct wartime target; path dependence explains why the weapons work keeps accumulating there.