I just got the Italeri 1/72 Tu-22m Backfire and as expected it is a reissue of the Esci kit. It seems the moulds survived well, however the original kit had a number of flaws and seems none of them was fixed (I hoped instead for a revised tooling).
The kit depicts the later Tu-22m3 Backfire C, even if (apart from the intakes) the airframe is still closer to a Backfire B. When Esci did the moulds they changed only the intakes, while instead there are many more differences between the 2 versions. The decals are for a soviet, a russian and an ukrainian backfire, all in the grey/white scheme.
As others modellers said, there's a lot of work to do if you want something that looks like the real thing, but many of the changes (fuselage lenght, bomb bay, wing glove, nose, intakes, tail turret) can be made with some "surgery": the only mistake really difficult to fix are the "double bubble" rear fuselage sides, maybe these can be "painted" with a darker shade of grey and a raised mask.
Now that the kit is available again, Mr Neomega please make a great detail/correction set!!!
More news when (and if) I finish the kit.
My 0.02