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Ethiopia has received its first Russian Su-35 fighter jets, and plans to buy four S-400 air defense batteries from Moscow, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced, as his government fights rebellions on two fronts at home.

Getting into it: Abiy posted the news on X on Wednesday while in Moscow for the Russia-Africa Summit, saying Ethiopia would get 12 Su-35s and that the jets showed up a year ahead of schedule. Russia’s state arms exporter said the first two were handed over that day at an airfield outside Moscow.

Abiy didn’t say what the deal costs, where the jets will be based or when the S-400s, which are built to shoot down planes and missiles, will be delivered. He said the new hardware would help Ethiopia “preemptively deter aggression.” The jets may have originally been built for Egypt, which dropped the deal after Washington threatened it with sanctions.

The deal comes as fighting flares up again in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, where rebels went on the offensive last month and restarted a war that left roughly 500,000 civilians dead from 2020 to 2022. The government leaned on drones bought from abroad to get the upper hand in that war. The military is also tied up with Fano, an armed group in the neighboring Amhara region, and Ethiopia has cut ties with Eritrea, saying its neighbor is helping the rebels. Eritrea denies it.

Russia has tried to deepen military ties across Africa despite Western sanctions over the Ukraine war, supplying about 15% of the continent’s major weapons imports from 2021 to 2025.