I see. I was talking about the gunships specifically, though. Is that right?
Yes, it turns out you're right. Also, when the Ogaden was finally retaken, it was with aid from the USSR:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070107093450/http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_188.shtml
As for the relevance of African examples to the present crisis in Ukraine, well, here's one I made earlier:
1. Many of the problems of the European project at the moment have been highlighted by the crisis of Ukraine. As some note, there is a provable and demonstrable presence of far-right and neo-Nazi groups at the Maidan protest site where the present crisis in Ukraine began. This was signaled by, for example, the use of the Celtic cross by some protestors at the Maidan. That cross may have been an old Celtic symbol, but it has been adopted by the far-right in Europe in recent decades. Are we to suppose that there was a hitherto unknown Irish community in Kiev which decided to join the Maidan demonstrations? Or is it more likely that those demonstrations were contaminated by the presence of fascist elements? Even if this latter question is answered in the affirmative, however, it does not mean that the present crisis in the Ukraine can be reduced simply to a matter of a fascist surge: equally reactionary and chauvinistic far-right elements can be identified on the pro-Russian side also. A more detailed consideration of the present Ukraine crisis would reveal that we cannot assume that this is just a repeat performance of earlier decades in European history (in any case, reasoning via historical analogy is only helpful up to a certain point, and beyond that point becomes actively unhelpful and even misleading).
What appears to me to be a major factor in this crisis is the failure of the post-Soviet oligarchy in Ukraine to become a cohesive and coherent ruling social bloc. Marx may have described the bourgeois class of his own time as a “band of warring brothers”, but it was a fact that the members of that class remained brothers allowed them to form stable states that could act as their collective “executive committees”. The failure of the post-Soviet Ukrainian elites to achieve this sort of coherence (and the fact that Russia has only been able to achieve via a revival of ‘Strongman’ rule) indicates that we are in this case (and possibly in others) in a new situation. During the interwar period, traditional ruling elites in many European states invited fascist movements into power in order to secure their own rule. While ultimately this led to catastrophic war, this manoeuvre was able to stabilize the political situation in at least some states, for at least some time (with well-known and disastrous costs to ethnic minorities and the working class).
What we see in the case of contemporary Ukraine is something closer to the ‘failed states’ in some parts of post-neoliberal Africa. There, disorder becomes a political tool which sections of the ruling group can draw upon in order to sustain their
individual power, at the cost of the wider stability of the state, the economic development of their societies, and the well-being of the masses (Chabal and Daloz 1999: but see also Hungwe and Hungwe (2000) who criticize these authors for reproducing some stereotypical views of Africa and its crisis). The classic case would be Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) under the dictator Mobutu. During the 1970s, this autocratic ruler was regarded as a sort of African equivalent of the Iranian Shah - an autocrat, true, but one who was presiding over the rapid modernization of his country (Reno 2006: 44). In the 1980s, his policies led to IMF enforced austerity, popular suffering, and popular revolt. Mobutu secured his rule against the threat of this revolt by allowing not just a multi-party system, but one in which there were over two hundred separate political parties. This led to an opposition that was both divided and neutralized, and to an ongoing crisis of the post-Zairian Congolese state.
While it would be foolish to assume that this model is repeating itself in Eurasia, there does appear to me to be at least some sort of ‘family resemblance’ between them. My point here is that the crisis in Ukraine may be a harbinger not of greater Eurasian integration, nor even of a western Imperialist drive eastward, but rather of a greater disintegration of that space.
