Needless to say, the events in eastern Europe this last week are upsetting on many fronts. First, the unprovoked and senseless invasion of Ukraine by Russia is beyond words. Personally, I hope the western countries do not follow the example of what happened in Europe that ultimately led to WWII. Appeasement and acceptance didn’t work then, and won’t work now. Our hearts are with Ukraine, and we hope they will be successful in defeating the Russian invasion.

On a lesser level of concern…. these events are and will for the foreseeable future affect trade with Russia, and for us, with obtaining stocks of Roden, Zvezda and Eastern Express kits. As we experienced a bit of a “run” on Zvezda and Roden kits this last weekend, we are withdrawing the few we have left from sale until we can re-stock, which may be a while. The US distributor already raised prices on Zvezda kits a couple of weeks ago by about 15%, there could be more to come.

We still have a good stock of the Eastern Express Airbus A.220-300 and BAC 1-11-200/-300/-400 kits, so for the time being they remain for sale. Unfortunately our kit plans featuring EE kits are on hold for the foreseeable future.

The following was written before the invasion…. the text updated to reflect the current situation. I am sure plans will now change, though we hope that when Russia withdraws, and tensions lessen, that these new kits will be released.

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Two kits announced for 2021 are in stock: (well, they were, we are trying to find a few more)

ZVE-7039 Airbus A.350-900 Aeroflot

ZVE-7040 Airbus A.321CEO, Condor

Finally, Zvezda has announced some of their new kit plans for 2022. As anticipated, when we saw the extra clear windows in the recently released Boeing 757-200 kit, indeed a 757-300 will be released at some point in 2022.

ZVE-7041 Boeing 757-300, Condor “Wie lieben Fliegen”

ZVE-7043 Airbus A.321NEO, Turkish Airlines

Roden has, so far, only announced one new ‘transport’ category 1/144 scale kit release for 2022.

ROD349 Boeing RC135U, USAF

Apologies for the size and quality of the image…. this is all that has been published to date.