I. Sudan: the war the world stopped watching
The war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti), entered its 1,000th day in January 2026. Six months later, it continues. By the most recent estimates from the International Rescue Committee and the UN, the war has killed approximately 150,000 people, displaced more than 11 million internally, driven another 4 million across borders into Chad, Egypt, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic, and produced what the IRC and UN have both described as the largest humanitarian catastrophe ever recorded.
Hunger is the central feature of the crisis. The World Health Organization estimates that 20 million Sudanese now require health assistance and 21 million require food assistance. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network has formally classified famine conditions in multiple regions, including the Darfur city of El Fasher, the South Kordofan towns of Kadugli and Dilling, and parts of the Nuba Mountains. Famine in Sudan is not a metaphor or a warning. It is the technical classification, sustained over months, in a country of 50 million people.
In October 2025, the RSF overran El Fasher, the last major SAF-held city in Darfur, after a siege of more than 500 days. Within days, satellite imagery analysis by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab documented systematic mass killings; the UN later concluded that the RSF's actions in the city bore “the hallmarks of genocide.” The CSIS estimates 6,000 people were killed in the first three days alone. A UN team that gained access to the city for the first time in early 2026 described it as a “crime scene,” with evidence that bodies had been systematically burned to destroy evidence of the killings.
The international response to the war has been characterised by what aid groups call “a global failure.” The UN halved its 2026 humanitarian appeal to $23 billion citing donor fatigue. The World Food Programme cut food rations by 70 percent beginning in January, including for communities already in famine. The United Arab Emirates is the RSF's primary external backer, supplying weapons and financing reportedly routed through Chad, Libya, and Ethiopia. Saudi Arabia and Egypt have backed the SAF. None of the international mediation efforts — led at various points by the United States, Saudi Arabia, the African Union, and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development — has produced a sustained ceasefire.
The strategic situation as of June 2026: the SAF holds most of northern, eastern and central Sudan, including Khartoum, which it recaptured in March 2025 after nearly two years under RSF control. The government formally returned to the capital from its wartime base in Port Sudan on 11 January 2026. The RSF holds most of Darfur and has pushed eastward through Kordofan, taking the Heglig oilfield (Sudan's largest) in December 2025. Kordofan itself remains contested, with control of key towns shifting from one week to the next. The conflict has spread to threaten oil infrastructure, agricultural heartland, and the Red Sea coast. There is no current credible diplomatic track. The war will continue.
The catastrophe does not stay inside Sudan. The IOM recorded 12,684 Sudanese arrivals to Europe by sea and land between January and November 2025, a 3.3-fold increase over the same period in 2024, with the majority arriving in Greece via a new Libyan–Greek corridor that has made Crete and the smaller island of Gavdos primary points of arrival. Sudanese asylum applications across Europe rose 147 percent in September 2025 compared to a year earlier. Most Sudanese refugees remain in neighbouring countries; UNHCR has warned publicly that if conditions inside Sudan and the surrounding region continue to deteriorate, the flow north will accelerate. Separately, the UN Panel of Experts, Amnesty International, and the US Congress have documented the arms pipeline that supplies the RSF. Norinco-manufactured Chinese howitzers identified by Amnesty in Khartoum in March 2025 were originally sold to the United Arab Emirates, the only country to import that model from China; Bulgarian-manufactured mortar rounds seized from RSF convoys in North Darfur in November 2024 had been exported to the UAE in 2019. The UAE denies supplying the RSF. The UN Security Council's Chapter-VII Darfur arms embargo, in force since 2004 and renewed in September 2025, is binding on all member states. The same governments that purchase weapons from the UAE and sell weapons to it are the governments whose 2026 humanitarian appeal for Sudan is currently funded at under twenty percent. And the war's geography matters at sea: Sudan's Red Sea coast sits opposite Yemen, on the southern approach to the Suez Canal. Carriers already routing around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid Houthi disruption in Bab al-Mandeb are watching the Sudanese coastline as a second potential chokepoint in the same chain. The catastrophe in Khartoum and El Fasher is also a story about whose ships go where, and whose money buys what.
II. Ethiopia: a vote with a foregone conclusion
Ethiopia voted in parliamentary and regional elections on Monday, 1 June 2026. More than 50 million voters were registered. Voting did not take place in Tigray, where the National Election Board cited “unfavourable conditions” following the 2020-2022 civil war and continuing political turmoil; or in at least eight of Amhara's 138 constituencies, where the Fano militia controls swathes of the countryside; or in significant parts of Oromia, where fighting between government forces and the Oromo Liberation Army has continued for years.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's Prosperity Party is expected to win in a landslide. Results are expected by 11 June. The Prosperity Party took 96 percent of seats at the previous election in 2021, and analysts from the Chatham House think tank described this election in advance as “likely to be among the least competitive of the seven national elections held since multiparty democracy was introduced in 1991.” In dozens of constituencies, Prosperity Party candidates ran unopposed. The opposition, divided across more than forty parties and operating under what Ethiopian civic groups describe as systematic restrictions on rallies and media access, mounted what observers described as a largely symbolic challenge.
Abiy was appointed prime minister in 2018 following mass protests against the long-ruling EPRDF coalition. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for ending Ethiopia's long-running border conflict with Eritrea. His tenure has since included the Tigray civil war of 2020-2022, in which an estimated 600,000 people died; ongoing insurgencies in Amhara and Oromia; the construction and 2025 commissioning of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, which Egypt opposes; and what international observers describe as the steady consolidation of one-party rule. Abiy himself has characterised the period as one of national rebuilding under conditions of necessary state authority.
The economic picture is more favourable. Officials project economic growth above 10 percent in 2026, among the fastest rates on the African continent. Prosperity Party campaign material focused on improved food security and macroeconomic performance. Whether these gains are equitably distributed across the country's regions and ethnic groups is contested. Whether the federal system itself — under which Ethiopia is constitutionally organised as a federation of ethnically defined regional states — can survive the current centralisation pressures is an open question.
III. The region between
Sudan and Ethiopia share a 1,600-kilometre border, much of it disputed. The Fashaga triangle, an agricultural area claimed by both countries, has been the site of repeated clashes since 2020. Tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees have crossed into Ethiopia's Amhara region since the war began, adding pressure to a region already in active insurgency. Ethiopian Airlines flies the last regular commercial route between Addis Ababa and Port Sudan; the airline reported $7.6 billion in 2025 revenue but confirmed that approximately $30 million of frozen funds remain inaccessible in Eritrea, with which Ethiopia's relations have deteriorated significantly since the 2022 end of the Tigray war.
The CSIS analysis of RSF supply lines indicates that arms and financing for the Sudanese paramilitary have been routed in part through Ethiopian territory. Addis Ababa has denied this. The Ethiopian government has, however, declined to formally condemn the RSF or its UAE backers, breaking with the African Union position. The Horn of Africa's regional architecture — the African Union, IGAD, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs — is operating in both countries simultaneously, with limited capacity in either.
Two patterns are visible in the region this week. In Sudan, a state has effectively collapsed and a war continues that the international system has been unable to stop. In Ethiopia, a state is consolidating its political control under conditions that limit the practical exercise of democratic competition. The two trajectories are not the same. Both are visible in the Horn of Africa simultaneously, and both will shape the region for years to come.
Sources
Sudan war: WHO on Sudan at 1,000 days of war; CSIS — “The Sudan War in 10 Charts”; UN News on the war's spread across Sudan.
El Fasher and famine: Peoples Dispatch on famine across multiple Sudanese regions; U.S. Congressional Research Service on the war and humanitarian crisis; UN News on the 150,000 death estimate and IRC Emergency Watchlist designation.
Sudan crisis ongoing tracking: Operation Broken Silence's Sudan crisis guide (updated 29 May 2026).
Sudanese migration to Europe: IOM Displacement Tracking Matrix on Sudanese arrivals to Europe (January-November 2025); InfoMigrants on the UNHCR warning and rising flows; InfoMigrants on the Libyan–Greek corridor and the 147 percent rise in Sudanese asylum applications.
UAE arms pipeline to RSF: Amnesty International on Chinese weapons in RSF hands traced to UAE; US House confirmation of UAE-RSF arms transfers; UN Panel of Experts investigating Bulgarian mortar rounds re-exported via UAE; Al Jazeera on the UAE denial.
Ethiopia election: Al Jazeera on the 1 June election; France 24 on the vote and the regions where polling did not take place; Reuters via CNBC Africa on the political and economic context; Africanews on the opposition's position.
Further Reading
For readers wanting to understand more about Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Horn of Africa region, the following sources offer different vantage points — international institutional, regional, African continental, and on-the-ground voices. Read across them.
On Sudan, ongoing situation tracking: ReliefWeb — Sudan. The UN's humanitarian information service. The most comprehensive ongoing source for situation reports, humanitarian access updates, and primary documents from agencies operating inside Sudan.
On Sudan, investigative journalism: Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. The lab's satellite-imagery analysis has produced some of the most detailed independent documentation of mass atrocities in El Fasher, Khartoum, and elsewhere. Primary research, not advocacy.
On Sudan, African continental perspective: African Union. The continental body's official position on Sudan and its mediation efforts. The AU's analysis differs from Western framings in important ways and is worth reading directly rather than only through international press summaries.
On Sudan, voices from inside: Radio Dabanga. An independent Sudanese news service operating from outside the country since 2008, with reporting networks inside Sudan. One of the few sources for daily reporting from inside both SAF-controlled and RSF-controlled areas.
On Ethiopia, broad analysis: International Crisis Group — Ethiopia. ICG's ongoing analysis of Ethiopian politics, the federal system, and the various insurgencies. Centrist international perspective.
On Ethiopia, independent regional analysis: Addis Standard. An independent Ethiopian publication producing some of the most substantive coverage of domestic politics, the federal system, and the Tigray-Amhara-Oromia dynamics that determine the country's trajectory.
On Ethiopia, the Tigray and post-conflict context: Tghat. A Tigrayan-perspective publication on the 2020-2022 war and its continuing aftermath. Reflects Tigrayan voices that the federal government has substantially restricted from domestic Ethiopian media space.
On the Horn of Africa broadly: Africa Center for Strategic Studies. A U.S. Defense Department-affiliated research centre that produces serious analysis on African security and political dynamics. Readers should know the institutional perspective; the analytical work is detailed and useful.