By the end of 2025, the civil war in Sudan had hardened into a durable east–west cleavage, with the Sudanese Armed Forces retaining control of the Nile valley, Khartoum’s core institutions, and the Red Sea littoral while the Rapid Support Forces held most of western Sudan, including Darfur and wide tracts of Kordofan. This arrangement is not a fleeting battlefield pattern but a reconfiguration of political geography: one actor holds the administrative and maritime levers of the state, the other holds contiguous interior territory rich in manpower and natural wealth. The two orders now face different strategic imperatives because possession of cities, ports, pipelines, and resource nodes produces fundamentally different kinds of power.

SAF’s control of Khartoum and Port Sudan confers internationally recognized legitimacy, access to formal financial systems, and maritime gateways for commerce and external military logistics. These assets are the core of any future reconstitution of state authority. Yet those advantages are constrained by a shrinking strategic depth. Extended supply lines into the interior, the loss of peripheral towns, and mounting attrition have weakened SAF’s capacity to translate legal recognition into effective territorial control beyond the Nile axis. With administrative centers intact but hinterland reach frayed, SAF increasingly resembles a coastal polity whose influence over the broader country is conditional and costly to sustain.

The RSF’s gains present a contrasting logic. By consolidating control over Darfur and Kordofan and by seizing nodal towns such as El Fasher and Babanusa, the RSF shortened its logistical lines, secured recruitment pools through local tribal networks, and established defensive belts that also serve as springboards for further projection. Babanusa sits astride overland routes that connect Darfur to central Kordofan and onward toward Khartoum, so its occupation materially reduces the cost and risk of moving men and materiel eastward. El Fasher functions as the administrative and logistical center of North Darfur, enabling the RSF to centralize local taxation, conscription, and coercive control. These linked territorial holdings create a compact theatre in which the RSF can sustain operations while attempting to monopolize basic services and revenue extraction.

The seizure of Heglig in December 2025 was the decisive institutional multiplier that converted territorial control into immediate economic leverage. Heglig contains the principal processing facilities that allow much of South Sudan’s crude to reach export markets through the Greater Nile pipeline to Port Sudan. Control of that processing node gives the RSF the capacity to threaten or manage flows on which Juba’s budget depends. Possession of Heglig therefore deprives SAF of a major export revenue source and provides the RSF with a hard-currency instrument it can use in regional bargaining, sanitation of revenue streams, and coercive diplomacy.

Heglig fuses three interlocking forms of leverage. If the RSF can secure production and maintain a route to market, the field can yield regularized receipts through transit fees, taxation, or quasi-official accounts and thereby underwrite patronage, administration, and a longer-term presence. By threatening interruption, the RSF gains a non-kinetic coercive tool with immediate leverage over South Sudan. Controlling the processing infrastructure also compels commercial operators and regional states to negotiate operational guarantees, which can produce de facto accommodation even absent formal recognition. These effects are mutually reinforcing: economic opportunity incentivizes attempts at routinized administration, while the diplomatic imperative to keep oil flowing pressures outside actors to engage.

Those possibilities are contingent and fragile. Oil infrastructure is vulnerable to sabotage, technical disruption, and strikes, and damage to wells or pipelines can depress output for months or years. Insurers, traders, and multinational purchasers can impose effective embargoes by refusing to accept risk, and sanctions or reputational constraints can sever the commercial chains required to monetize production. Armed patrons and mercenary networks that sustain both sides complicate governance prospects by supplying military capacity while delegitimizing the RSF in Western capitals. Put simply, Heglig offers a path from militia predation to revenue-backed governance, but that path requires repeated and cooperative choices by external commercial, diplomatic, and financial actors.

For SAF the dilemma is stark and immediate. Mounting a campaign to retake Heglig risks destroying the very assets that generate hard currency and would be necessary for post-conflict reconstruction, while leaving the field in RSF hands accepts a reduced economic position and a weakened bargaining posture. Retaining Khartoum and Port Sudan preserves recognition, administrative instruments, and maritime access, but it does not substitute for the territorial contiguity, resource base, and local coercive capacity that enable sustained rule on the ground. The cumulative effect is an asymmetry in which SAF holds formal trappings of statehood but lacks the material foundation required to govern across Sudan’s interior.

South Sudan’s response exemplifies the fiscal logic that Heglig imposes on neighbors. Juba’s posture has been pragmatic hedging rather than ideological alignment. Reported arrangements in which South Sudan deployed forces to guard Heglig under tripartite coordination reflect a calculation to preserve exports while avoiding full-scale military escalation. That contingency-based diplomacy balances the immediate imperative of budgetary survival against the risk of legitimizing an unrecognized belligerent, and it illustrates how control of a critical node compels transactional engagement even by states that would otherwise seek distance.

Whether RSF-held territory can become a de facto polity depends on four interrelated capacities: the ability to maintain sustained, monopoly control over territory and population; the capacity to provide basic governance and public goods; the ability to secure and routinize revenue streams; and the maintenance of durable external relations, even if only transactional. Heglig directly increases the plausibility of the revenue condition and indirectly supports efforts to consolidate the others, but success is not automatic. The RSF must protect technical infrastructure from violence, persuade sufficient segments of the commercial chain to do business under risk, and either accept forms of external oversight or reconfigure patronage to reduce dependence on illicit markets. Failure on any of these points could render the capture an ephemeral prize rather than the foundation of a sustainable polity.

The humanitarian and legal consequences of the RSF’s territorial consolidation amplify constraints on external accommodation. Reports of mass atrocities, large-scale displacement, and restricted humanitarian access, especially following the fall of El Fasher, undercut any claim that RSF control equates to responsible governance and create powerful incentives for Western capitals and multilateral institutions to condition engagement on accountability. Those moral and legal imperatives limit the scope of public recognition, restrict commercial risk appetite, and increase the political costs of normalizing transactions that would sustain RSF revenue flows.

Ethiopia and other neighbors face a practical recalibration of regional policy. Addis Ababa is effectively adjacent to two different entities: an eastern SAF enclave that secures maritime access and a western RSF-controlled hinterland that shapes land routes and cross-border stability. A dual-track approach that preserves formal relations with SAF to protect access to Port Sudan while developing pragmatic mechanisms to engage RSF authorities for border management, trade, and humanitarian coordination is therefore the most realistic way to minimize spillover. That approach does not legitimize abuses but recognizes the need to institutionalize de-confliction, secure essential lifelines, and create space for diplomacy and accountability.

The most plausible medium-term equilibrium is a partitioned Sudan in which international recognition and maritime access concentrate in an eastern rump while territorial sovereignty and resource control lie with a western RSF polity whose international status will be transactional, contested, and conditioned by humanitarian and legal constraints. That outcome is neither inevitable nor irreversible, but it is the politically coherent projection that links battlefield gains to political incentives and regional behavior. The capture of Heglig is the fulcrum of that scenario: if the RSF transforms control into dependable revenue without provoking sanctions or commercial refusals, it will shift from being a high-capacity militia to a durable territorial governor. If it cannot, the capture will intensify conflict, deepen humanitarian collapse, and leave both SAF’s claim to statehood and the RSF’s claim to de facto sovereignty unstable and costly. External actors will therefore confront agonizing trade-offs between preserving vital economic flows and enforcing norms, choices that will shape Sudan’s political geography for years to come.

By Bezawit Eshetu, Researcher, Horn Review