ADDIS ABABA (Reuters, staff reports) – Ethiopia’s government has signed a deal to buy more than 200 tanks at a cost of $100 million from Ukraine’s state-owned military hardware export firm Ukrspetsexport, a Ukrainian official said on June 10.
Media in Ukraine, which has exported in the order of $1 billion of arms annually in recent years and mostly to developing countries, said the subject of the deal could be Soviet-designed T-72 tanks.
“The deal was signed three days ago. It is one of the biggest deals for the past 15 years,” said the official, speaking in Ukraine’s capital city, Kyiv, and declining to be named.
The agreement comes weeks after the Horn of Africa nation signed a deal to buy unmanned aerial vehicles from Israeli company BlueBird Aero Systems for surveillance operations, according to separate Ukrainian media reports.
Authorities in Addis Ababa were not available for comment on either case.
Addis Ababa has been at loggerheads with Eritrea since their 1998-2000 border war which killed around 80,000 people, and both sides have amassed large amounts of troops along their disputed frontier ever since.
Ethiopia is also wary of its porous border with Somalia, which it invaded in late 2006 to topple an Islamist movement in the capital Mogadishu.
The intervention sparked an Islamist insurgency which still rages although Ethiopian troops pulled out in early 2009.
