Kiev is a Soviet and Ukrainian brand of photographic equipment including cameras manufactured by the Arsenal Factory in Kiev, Ukraine. The camera nameplates show the name "KIEV", with older cameras using "КИЕВ" (in Russian language) or "КИЇВ" (in Ukrainian language) in Cyrillic. At the end of November 2009 Gevorg Vartanyan of Arax, a Ukrainian distributor of reworked medium format Kiev cameras and lenses, wrote to tell customers that the Arsenal factory was closing after 245 years of operation. The email said that management had been turned over to the Special Construction Department (SKTB), all work had stopped and the workers laid off, and that the factory warehouse was empty. He thought that Arax had enough cameras and parts to remain in business for at least another 4–5 years. The amount of stock remaining with other distributors around the world is unknown. Kiev 35mm rangefinders Arsenal produced several 35mm film rangefinders which were clones of the pre-WWII Contax II and Contax III cameras. Kiev rangefinders retained the same lens mount as the pre-WWII Contax rangefinders, so the lenses can be interchanged between Kiev and Contax rangefinders. The lens mount of those cameras is pretty sophisticated compared with other cameras of the time. The so-called Contax/Kiev bayonet actually consists of two bayonets - the inner bayonet, which is used exclusively for 50mm lenses, and the outer bayonet, which is used for all the other lenses. This makes adapting Kiev lenses which use internal bayonet to modern mirrorless cameras complicated compared to those that use the external bayonet. The internal bayonet lenses don't have a focus ring, because the bayonet is actually the helix. Adapters for such lenses tend to be more expensive that simple external bayonet adapters. The number of Kiev rangefinders vastly exceeded that of the pre-war Dresden and post-war Jena and Stuttgart Contaxes. Kiev After the WWII had ended, the Soviet Union demanded new sets of Contax tools from the original toolmaker in Dresden and then ordered a fair number of trial cameras to be made with Zeiss trademarks and coated lenses from these 1946 in post-war East Germany. With this successful, everything together with German instructors were transferred to Kyiv. Missing specialists were in a few cases recruited in West Germany. Any still available parts went in the same direction. In fact, removing the front of some very early Kiev cameras, one could see that the metal was originally