Myanmar's Junta Nearly Doubled Its Air War in a Year — and the World Kept Talking

Five years after its coup, the Myanmar military has found a modality of terror that outlasts its collapsing ground war: the air. Junta aircraft and drones carried out roughly 2,471 strikes on the country in 2024. In 2025 that number jumped to about 4,881 — nearly double, according to tracking by Myanmar's shadow National Unity Government. The military that lost so much territory to ethnic armed organisations and resistance forces since the 2023 Operation 1027 offensive didn't need to hold ground to keep killing. It just needed fuel and a target list.

The dead keep piling up in a war most of the world has stopped narrating as a war. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project put Myanmar's conflict fatalities past 100,000 since the coup this year, ranking it second only to the Palestinian territories for lethality. In the first half of 2026 alone, ACLED logged more than a dozen mass killings totalling over 450 civilian deaths, close to 40 percent of them in the central Sagaing region — the same region the junta swept through in May with roughly 700 soldiers, according to Reuters interviews with survivors, killing at least 40 people in Myit Chay township. A UN human rights report counted 702 civilian deaths attributable to the military in the six months around this year's stage-managed election, with airstrikes the single largest killer.

This isn't a side effect of a stalemate. It's a strategy. As the Tatmadaw's infantry lost the capacity to hold territory, its command — reorganised in March under a new commander-in-chief, longtime loyalist and former spymaster Ye Win Oo — substituted air power for ground control. Bomb the school, bomb the clinic, bomb the monastery: sever the population from the resistance by making support for it unlivable. In May, an airstrike on a school in Sagaing's Depayin township killed at least 22 children and two teachers. None of this needs speculation to make the point — the junta's own aviation-fuel imports tell the story. Investigators cited by Amnesty International found Myanmar imported over 109,000 tons of jet fuel in 2025 alone, a 69 percent jump from 2024, brought in via sanctions-evading tankers that switch off their tracking transponders, the same trick used by Russia, Iran and North Korea to move oil nobody is supposed to be selling them.

And still the diplomatic choreography continues. ASEAN's "Five-Point Consensus," adopted within days of the coup and ignored by the junta ever since, remains the official framework regional governments cite while quietly restoring contact. Washington sent a rare official delegation to Naypyidaw this year to negotiate a prisoner release — an engagement framed as humanitarian, but one more crack in an isolation policy the junta has spent five years trying to outlast. China, meanwhile, keeps brokering ceasefires between the junta and the ethnic armies parked on its border, protecting its own mining and dam interests (the shelved Myitsone dam project is reportedly back on the table) rather than protecting Sagaing's civilians. None of these actors have to fire a shot to be complicit; providing fuel, legitimacy, or a negotiating partner is enough.

There is no clean international rescue coming for Myanmar, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of lie. What there is: a resistance movement — the NUG, the ethnic armed organisations, the People's Defence Forces — that has taken and held territory the junta could never retake without air power, and a documentation apparatus (NUG's Ministry of Human Rights, ACLED, independent monitors) that keeps naming the strikes, the schools, the fuel shipments, by date and by number, so that "nobody could have known" is never an available excuse. An ICC prosecutor is reportedly seeking a warrant for junta chief Min Aung Hlaing. Whether it goes anywhere depends less on The Hague than on whether anyone with power to choke off jet fuel actually chooses to.

Sources

ACLED via Economic Times: Myanmar military escalates civilian killings
Myanmar war toll tops 100,000 since 2021 coup
CRRIC: Myanmar deadliest conflict matrix (NUG airstrike data)
The Irrawaddy: Iran-linked 'ghost ships' fueling Myanmar junta's air war
Mizzima: NUG condemns school bombing and ongoing war crimes
Wikipedia: Myanmar civil war (2021–present)