Increasing worries exist regarding the chance of warfare involving Horn of Africa neighbours, Ethiopia and the Eritrean government, as hostile rhetoric has ratcheted up in the last month.
Ethiopia's, being landlocked, demands for access to the sea coast through Eritrea has triggered a heated verbal exchange.
PM Abiy Ahmed previously announced in last year that his country's maritime access was an existential matter, comments that Eritrea ignored.
Relations between the both governments have regularly been difficult. Following a decades-long fight for sovereignty, Eritrea, which has a long Red Sea coastline, officially seceded from Ethiopia in the early 1990s, rendering it landlocked.
In 1998, a territorial conflict started in which over a hundred thousand people lost their lives.
Abiy and military leader General Birhanu Jula have openly claimed control of Eritrea's coastal city of the port of Assab – some 60 km from the boundary - and suggested the desire to take it by force.
On 1 September, Abiy said the country's "error" of losing entry to the Red Sea as a because of Eritrean independence would be "rectified soon".
The Ethiopian envoy to Kenya, retired Gen Bacha Debele, said that Assab was "Ethiopia's wealth" and would be given back "through military action".
Amid ongoing challenges from Ethiopian officials, Eritrea's reaction has been confined to brief comments on online platforms from Communications Head Yemane Gebremeskel.
He has rejected Ethiopia's demand for sea access calling it "hazardous" and a "harmful plan" of "territorial claims" – a approach of retaking previous domains.
Eritrean authorities alerted on mid-September that moves to validate "flagrant aggression" would have significant repercussions for the Ethiopian government and its neighbors and is a "redline that should not be crossed|violated|breached".
So far, there are no reports of large-scale army activities in the frontier regions between the both nations.
Nonetheless, in the country, national TV has displayed training completions of many recruits at multiple army bases.
The head of personnel division of the defense force, General Hachalu, commented lately in an interview that the army was in a "reliable position" as "tens of thousands of recruits" were joining it, which he said was "a warning to our opponents".
For more than half a century from the late 19th century, Eritrea was administered by Italian rulers.
After Italy's defeat, it was then controlled by the British administration before turning into a integrated region of Ethiopia.
Yet in the early 1960s Emperor Haile Selassie I cancelled this system and the region became fully incorporated into the Ethiopian state.
A extended armed struggle occurred, ending with military reversal in the early 1990s. Independence was then approved by voters in a vote in 1993.
Briefly in the 1990s, there were friendly connections between the authorities in Ethiopia's capital and Asmara, but they fell out over the precise positioning of their mutual frontier, resulting in war in 1998.
Even though this finished in a ceasefire agreement in 2000, it was incompletely executed, and the two nations stayed at in dispute.
This ended in 2018, when the Prime Minister made overtures to Eritrean President the president. The both leaders agreed to a announcement that the war was over – a action that earned Abiy the international recognition.
The both administrations were then partners in the country's 2020-2022 armed struggle in the northern region.
Yet relations have subsequently deteriorated again.
Elena Vance is a digital strategist with over a decade of experience in UK business consulting, specializing in technology-driven growth solutions.