Khartoum takes its drone case to the Security Council, naming Ethiopia and, separately, the UAE

Sudan’s army-aligned foreign ministry lodged formal complaints with the UN Security Council and the African Union Peace and Security Council on Sunday, accusing Addis Ababa of permitting RSF drone strikes to be launched from its soil and calling this “blatant aggression.” The accompanying report states that “since February 2026, armed drones have taken off from Ethiopian soil … to strike Sudanese cities and civilians,” naming Asosa Airport in western Ethiopia, the Kurmuk–Gizen border area and the Bahir Dar airbase in Amhara. It says “last month saw 28 attacks carried out by 97 drones.” The EEPA Horn of Africa situation report summarises the same filing as claiming 162 strikes launched from Ethiopian bases, killing 400 civilians and 102 military personnel. Those two sets of figures cannot be reconciled from the available reporting. None has independent verification.

The filing landed alongside two other attribution claims from the same ministry. On Saturday it said the drones were supplied by the UAE and launched from Ethiopia; Abu Dhabi, responding to the UN Panel of Experts, has said it is “not involved in the civil war in Sudan, nor has it provided arms or any related material to any party in Sudan since the outbreak of the conflict.” On 30 October Foreign Minister Mohieldin Salem told Russia’s Sputnik that Sudan had “irrefutable evidence, physical evidence” of Ukrainian military participation alongside the RSF, including snipers captured or killed. No evidence has been made public, Ukraine has not responded, and Rio Times reported it could find no UN document recording such a complaint.

The geography is worth holding. On Monday evening the SAF’s 4th Infantry Division said it had repelled RSF and SPLM-North attacks at Bakori in Geissan locality and Sali in Kurmuk locality, with commander Gen. Ismail al-Tayeb Hussein pledging continued operations; the RSF did not immediately comment, and the account is single-sourced to the division. Kurmuk is also one of the launch zones Khartoum named at the Security Council. Egypt’s foreign ministry, condemning the strikes on Saturday and listing damage across Gedaref, Khartoum, Al Jazirah, Red Sea, Sennar, White Nile and South Kordofan, demanded an end to the flow of weapons to the RSF through “countries neighbouring Sudan” — declining to name the state Khartoum had named hours earlier.

Assessment: Read Cairo’s sentence construction rather than its adjectives. Egypt condemns the campaign, identifies the RSF as the recipient, and then routes the arms demand through unnamed neighbours — a formula that protects the Emirati relationship while giving Khartoum the headline it wanted. That gap is the diplomatic news. On the filing itself: a belligerent’s figures, submitted in a complaint, with two mutually inconsistent totals and no Ethiopian reply yet recorded, establish intent rather than fact. The Sputnik interview is best understood as a statement about Khartoum’s alignment with Moscow, not about Ukraine. And note the October record: the deadliest single strike, 102 killed in a market, was in RSF-held Darfur.