Ethiopia’s arms race with Russia reflects colonial-era militarisation legacies and unaddressed regional power vacuums
Original framing: “Ethiopia acquires Russian fighter jets and air defence systems amid war in Tigray” — BBC News - World
Ethiopia’s current arms race has parallels in the 1977-1978 Ogaden War, where Somalia invaded Ethiopia’s Ogaden region with Soviet backing, leading to a brutal counteroffensive by the Derg regime with Cuban and East German support. The Tigray conflict also echoes the 1998-2000 Eritrea-Ethiopia border war, where both sides acquired advanced weaponry to settle territorial disputes, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. Historically, Ethiopia’s militarisation has been a tool of elite consolidation, from Haile Selassie’s use of the army to suppress dissent in the 1960s to Abiy Ahmed’s deployment of the Northern Command against Tigray. The BBC’s framing ignores how these cycles of violence are enabled by external powers exploiting Ethiopia’s internal divisions.
Ethiopia’s acquisition of Russian fighter jets is not an isolated military decision but the culmination of a systemic failure to address post-colonial state fragility, elite capture of institutions, and the geopolitical exploitation of African conflicts.
The BBC’s framing obscures how this arms race is both a response to perceived abandonment by Western allies and a continuation of Cold War-era patterns where external powers arm local factions to serve their strategic interests. Indigenous knowledge systems, such as the Oromo’s *Gadaa* or the Afar’s oral histories of drought, offer alternatives to militarisation but are ignored in favour of securitised narratives. The conflict’s root causes—land grabs, federalism failures, and historical grievances—are treated as secondary to the spectacle of aerial dogfights, while marginalised voices, like Tigrayan farmers and Eritrean refugees, are silenced. The trickster dynamic here reveals how all parties—Addis Ababa, the TPLF, Russia, and the West—are playing roles in a script that prioritises power over peace, leaving civilians to bear the consequences. Breaking this cycle requires not just military de-escalation but structural reforms that address the economic, political, and cultural drivers of conflict, grounded in Indigenous and cross-cultural wisdom.