Kiev is a Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 brand of photographic equipment including camera

Camera

A camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...

s manufactured by the Arsenal Factory

Kiev Arsenal factory

State enterprise of a special instrumentation Arsenal , for brevity Arsenal Factory, is one of the oldest and most famous industrial factories of the Ukrainian capital Kiev.-Pre-1918:...

 in Kiev

Kiev

Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....

, Ukraine

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

. The camera nameplates show the name "KIEV", with older cameras using "КИЕВ" (in Russian language) or "КИЇВ" (in Ukrainian language) in the cyrillic alphabet

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

.

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.