Today a plastic model made to promote Britain’s ambitions to produce a future combat aircraft sparked controversy when it publicly attacked the Russian Sukhoi Su-75 Checkmate model.

Speaking from a low-security shed in Warton, the model held a press conference this morning. The Tempest started by saying, “I am just as real as that Russian, yet nobody treated me like a real plane. This is really hurtful especially considering MiG’s bullshit history over the last twenty years. They tried to sell second-hand MiG-29s as new by painting them nice and have spent like a gazillion years to get MiG-35s into service and it costs about the same as the far better Su-35, yet…” At this point journalist Stephen Dave Dave Steven Stephens from the Passive Defense Aerospatial Awareness Journal heckled the Tempest model, shouting, “The Checkmate ain’t a MiG!” Without acknowledging her mistake, the Tempest model changed tack, noting that, “Sukhoi has taken like a gazillion years to get a handful of Su-57s into service – and they don’t even have the real engine yet do they?”

The Checkmate model responded later in the day (from a Moscow mixed recycling bin) opining that “The Tempest model is a joke, I’m full of real bits and I’m from a legitimate superpower. The wheel fell off the UK’s penny-farthing years ago yet they continue banging on with fantasies of greatness. Their last real fighter aircraft took its first flight in 1957! So as far as I’m concerned they can eat a bag of blini pancakes.”

The European Fuck-Ass mock-up was unavailable for comment.