For more than half a decade, a coalition of armed groups have struggled against the military junta of General Min Aung Hlaing in Myanmar. Despite achieving some successes in their first two years of rebellion, this alliance of protesters-turned-guerillas and ethnic militias from the country’s hinterlands have found little support beyond their country’s borders. Military rule in the country has endured due to the lifeline offered to it through external support from fellow authoritarian states, particularly Russia, and more cautiously China. Substantial geopolitical changes since the beginning of this decade, such as the emergence of a neo-authoritarian bloc, a general drift toward multipolarity, and democratic backsliding internationally, have together given Myanmar’s new military rulers an upper hand over its democratic challengers since 2021.

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The Spring Revolution

Following the military coup of February 1st 2021, a massive non-violent protest movement, dubbed ‘the Spring Revolution’, was brutally suppressed by Myanmar’s military forces. In the following weeks, Gen Z-led protests coalesced into the armed wing of the newly formed opposition National Unity Government. Yet unlike previous insurgencies, this current conflict has united the former-protesters with a number of ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) who have been struggling against the central government for decades, posing a new multi-front challenge to the junta.

The first two years of this new Civil War saw the alliance slowly gaining ground against the junta. In September 2021, the National Unity Government officially declared a ‘people’s defensive war’, and sped up the formation of the ‘People’s Defence Forces’, a nation-wide coalition of local militias formed to push back against the new junta. Over the next two years, the junta’s administration was mainly reduced to urban areas and to the centre of the country as the rebels slowly took more territory. As they continued to lose ground, the junta resorted to scorched earth tactics: burning thousands of villages to the ground, shelling residential areas, and carrying out airstrikes. The most infamous of these was the Pazigyi massacre in Sagaing region in April 2023, when more than 160 civilians were killed in one operation by the junta.

A dramatic change came with Operation 1027 in October 2023, when an alliance of ethnic militias overran over 200 military outposts in 90 days. Later, the junta lost a regional command centre for the first time in the conflict. These significant losses shattered the military’s image of invincibility, and overall, Operation 1027 was seen as a turning point by many Myanmar analysts.

Yet, within a year, the junta had recovered after receiving a huge increase in support from their fellow authoritarians. This external support, coupled with the re-introduction of general conscription that brought more than 100,000 young men into military, stabilized the conflict during 2024 and 2025. Since 2024, the junta has carried out a number of counter-offensives which has led to a loss of territory for the People’s Defence Forces and EAOs. The increased use of airstrikes and drones has taken a toll on the civilian population, food insecurity has become more prevalent, and the number of internally displaced people within Myanmar has risen to over three million. Despite their recent gains, the military has lost control over vast swathes of the country, including key trade routes with neighbouring states, and still only controls less than half of the country’s overall territory.

Throughout 2025, the junta employed lobbying groups in Washington DC in an attempt to normalise their image to US politicians. This was followed by the sham election held in December 2025 and January 2026, which was condemned by journalists, civil society, and political activists but garnered praise from the junta’s fellow authoritarians. Since the beginning of the second administration of President Donald Trump, the junta in Myanmar has continued to represent the PDF and EAOs as criminals and terrorists, while making cosmetic concessions such as transferring former-State Councillor of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, from prison to house arrest.

In an interview with the author in early-2026, an NUG spokesman based in Prague argued that: ‘if we received even five per cent of the weapons and equipment that Ukraine had received, we would have already won this war’. To procure weapons, some members of the PDF have made their own using 3D printers, while many have stolen guns from the military and the police, and others have bought weapons on the black market from Thailand and China. One civil society activist interviewed by the author claimed that ‘although Chinese officials have instructed EAOs not to sell weapons to the PDF… these instructions have not always been followed’.

Yet, despite their ingenuity and early successes, the coalition itself has been unstable. In addition to the difficulties experienced in procuring weapons, there has been in-fighting and disagreements over the long-term aims of the Spring Revolution. Some of the EAOs involved in the conflict have been struggling against the state since the late-1940s and have been running de-facto states for years; some of these EAOs are now aiming to gain........

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