If you walk through the Merkato in Addis Ababa early in the morning, before the exhaust fumes settle and the bargaining turns sharp, you will hear people talking about the price of teff. They talk about the cost of cooking oil, about whether a bag of grain has doubled since last month, and about the quiet anxiety of sending sons north toward a conflict that seems to have no end. Few people in the market stalls are asking for supersonic fighter jets. Yet high above the bread lines and the shuttered rural clinics, the skies over the Horn of Africa are being crowded with fresh iron, purchased with wealth this fragile nation can ill afford to burn.
The announcement that Ethiopia has acquired advanced Russian combat aircraft and air defense systems arrives as fighting once again flares across the northern region of Tigray. In state media and international defense dispatches, such transactions are inevitably dressed in the sterile language of statecraft. We are told of bilateral cooperation, strategic deterrence, and the modernization of national armed forces. But look beneath the glossy communiqués issued between Moscow and Addis Ababa, and the moral equation becomes devastatingly simple: a government facing profound economic distress has decided that the instruments of aerial bombardment take precedence over the preservation of human life.
We must speak honestly about what these acquisitions mean in practice, because the view from the ground is never as tidy as the view from a procurement office. In modern warfare across the Global South, high-performance fighter planes and sophisticated radar batteries are rarely deployed against foreign imperial invaders. They are turned inward. Over the past several years of brutal civil war, the people of Tigray—alongside communities in Amhara and Afar—have learned to listen to the drone of an approaching engine with absolute terror. Airstrikes do not neatly distinguish between combatants and families gathered at a village flour mill, or displaced persons sheltering beneath plastic sheeting. To deliver newly minted Russian warplanes into this theater is not to bring stability; it is to sharpen the blade of an ongoing tragedy.
Then there is the question of the ledger, an obsession that those of us who track debt and sovereignty can never shake. Ethiopia stands on the precipice of severe sovereign debt distress, desperately petitioning multilateral lenders and bilateral creditors for breathing room while its foreign exchange reserves evaporate. Basic public services are buckling under the weight of hyperinflation, climate shocks, and the catastrophic destruction of infrastructure in the north. When a state in this condition signs off on multimillion-dollar military hardware, it is borrowing against the future of its children. Every rouble sent to the Russian military-industrial complex is foreign currency stolen from drought relief, from the rebuilding of destroyed schools, and from the medicines that rural hospitals have lacked for months.
Moscow, for its part, plays an old and cynical game. Pushed to the fringes of Western commerce by sanctions and its own imperial adventure in Ukraine, the Kremlin is eager to peddle its hardware wherever questions about human rights and civilian casualties will not be asked. It wraps these arms deals in the fashionable rhetoric of multipolarity and anti-imperial solidarity, offering sovereign states the illusion of autonomy. But true anti-imperialism does not look like an indebted African nation funneling its meager resources into the pockets of Russian weapons oligarchs to wage war upon its own citizens. It looks like food security, sovereign industrial policy, and peace.
The international system bears its own quiet complicity here. Global institutions lecture the Global South endlessly about fiscal discipline, demanding structural cuts to social subsidies and strict limits on civil service wages. Yet the international arms bazaar remains remarkably fluid, oiled by easy credit and backchannel diplomacy, always ready to finance the tools of destruction even when the means of sustenance are withheld. Weapons are never subjected to structural adjustment programs. They are delivered on time, while humanitarian aid crawls through checkpoints and diplomatic bureaucracy.
True sovereignty cannot be measured in the payload capacity of a Russian fighter or the reach of a radar dish. It is found in the soil, in the classroom, and in the right of a farmer in Tigray, Oromia, or Amhara to till their field without casting a nervous eye toward the sky. Until the leaders in Addis Ababa and their patrons abroad understand that real strength lies in feeding and reconciling their people rather than outfitting their arsenals, these imported wings will bring neither victory nor peace. They will only cast a deeper, colder shadow over a land that has already seen too much grief.