Eritrea Condemns New US Sanctions

A burned tank stands near the town of Adwa, Tigray region, Ethiopia, March 18, 2021. (Reuters)
A burned tank stands near the town of Adwa, Tigray region, Ethiopia, March 18, 2021. (Reuters)
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Eritrea Condemns New US Sanctions

A burned tank stands near the town of Adwa, Tigray region, Ethiopia, March 18, 2021. (Reuters)
A burned tank stands near the town of Adwa, Tigray region, Ethiopia, March 18, 2021. (Reuters)

Eritrea on Saturday condemned the sanctions imposed on its military and other Eritrea-based individuals and entities by the United States a day earlier, calling them a continuation of Washington's "misguided and hostile policy".

The information ministry said in a statement the primary aim of the "illicit and immoral sanctions" was to inflict suffering and starvation on the Eritrean people so as to spur political unrest in the Horn of Africa country.

Washington announced the sanctions on Friday, targeting Eritrea for its role in the year-long war in northern Ethiopia. Washington said it was prepared to take action against other parties to the conflict.

The US Treasury Department blacklisted Eritrea's military, its ruling political party, the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ); the party's economic adviser; and the head of the Eritrean national security office, accusing them of contributing to the conflict in neighboring Ethiopia.

War broke out in November 2020 between Ethiopian federal troops and forces loyal to the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), the ruling party of Tigray. Thousands have been killed in the conflict, which has since spread into two neighboring regions in northern Ethiopia.

Early in the war, the Eritrean military sent in tanks and troops to aid its Ethiopian ally, Prime Minister Abiy. Eritrea has also used the conflict to settle old scores in Tigray, Reuters reported this month.



Ukraine Says Starlink’s Global Outage Hit Its Military Communications 

A man stands at the broken windows of his house after a Russian attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, July 21, 2025. (AP)
A man stands at the broken windows of his house after a Russian attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, July 21, 2025. (AP)
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Ukraine Says Starlink’s Global Outage Hit Its Military Communications 

A man stands at the broken windows of his house after a Russian attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, July 21, 2025. (AP)
A man stands at the broken windows of his house after a Russian attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, July 21, 2025. (AP)

Starlink systems used by Ukrainian military units were down for two and a half hours overnight, a senior commander said, part of a global issue that disrupted the satellite internet provider.

Ukraine's forces are heavily reliant on thousands of SpaceX's Starlink terminals for battlefield communications and some drone operations, as they have proved resistant to espionage and signal jamming throughout the three and a half years of fighting Russia's invasion.

Starlink experienced one of its biggest international outages on Thursday when an internal software failure knocked tens of thousands of users offline.

"Starlink is down across the entire front," Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine's drone forces, wrote on Telegram at 10:41 p.m. (1941 GMT) on Thursday.

He updated his post later to say that by about 1:05 a.m. on Friday the issue had been resolved. He said the incident had highlighted the risk of reliance on the systems, and called for communication and connectivity methods to be diversified.

"Combat missions were performed without a (video) feed, battlefield reconnaissance was done with strike (drones)," Brovdi wrote.

Oleksandr Dmitriev, the founder of OCHI, a Ukrainian system that centralizes feeds from thousands of drone crews across the frontline, told Reuters the outage showed that relying on cloud services to command units and relay battlefield drone reconnaissance was a "huge risk".

"If connection to the internet is lost ... the ability to conduct combat operations is practically gone," he said, calling for a move towards local communication systems that are not reliant on the internet.

Although Starlink does not operate in Russia, Ukrainian officials have said that Moscow's troops are also widely using the systems on the frontlines in Ukraine.