After five years of conflict and a tightly controlled election, Myanmar’s junta leader, Min Aung Hlaing, shed his uniform, named himself president and spoke of peace and reconciliation.
The release of elected President Win Myint, the reduction of Aung San Suu Kyi’s sentence and her transfer to house arrest all serve to reinforce this image.
These cosmetic moves, however, do not amount to a democratic transition. Rather, they are part of a political makeover by a military ruler who still cannot claim control over the country he claims to govern.
To understand Myanmar in 2026, it is more useful to look at the battlefield than speeches and pronouncements made in Naypyitaw. The coup-installed regime controls the capital, major airports and urban cores of Yangon and Mandalay.
Beyond these centers, however, its authority fades quickly. In areas where rebel forces hold sway, the military bombs, raids and blocks transit arteries. It punishes, not governs, civilian populations.
Myanmar is no longer a classic civil war with a central state fighting rebels on the margins. Since the coup, armed resistance has spread into central Myanmar, breaking the old center-periphery pattern.
The conflict is fragmented, with rival claims to legitimacy and multiple armed groups exercising power and control.
The anti-coup National Unity Government, or NUG, claims democratic legitimacy from the 2020 election and has built parallel armed and administrative structures, including People’s Defense Forces, or PDF – some of which it controls, many others which it doesn’t.
Min Aung Hlaing may control the state’s formal shell, but he does not command authority across Myanmar. Internationally, meanwhile, Myanmar’s UN seat is still held by Ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun, aligned with the pre-coup government, while ASEAN remains cautious and divided over the junta’s latest attempt at a makeover.
Map tells the story
The picture on the ground is just as revealing. ISP-Myanmar estimated in January that the regime had lost control of roughly 38% of the country’s territory and had not recovered at least 150 overrun bases.
A 2025 ISEAS study claimed that anti-junta armed groups controlled as much as half the country, while the military held only about a quarter.
Figures and estimates of who controls where may differ, but the broad picture does not: Myanmar’s map does not support the regime’s claim of restored national control and its recent tactical gains do not represent stabilization.
In northwestern Myanmar, the regime recently retook Falam, Chin State’s second city, after a six-month offensive involving ground assaults and heavy airstrikes. Its recapture is a reminder that the junta can still concentrate firepower.
But Falam does not indicate the revolution is waning. Resistance forces remain active across Chin State, and retaking a town is different from holding territory, governing people, reopening roads and restoring legitimacy.
The same is true in Magway, where the military recently seized Kangyi village in Saw Township, a strategic route to Chin State and onward toward Paletwa near the Rakhine State border. The move appears aimed not only at local control but at tightening pressure on routes feeding into Rakhine.
That matters because Rakhine State remains one of the clearest examples of the junta’s loss of authority. The Arakan Army now controls most of the state except for three townships, and the military is reduced to defending a few remaining strategic pockets, including Sittwe, Kyaukphyu, and Manaung.
Recent reports describe Arakan Army pressure around Sittwe, with the regime responding through naval blockades and airstrikes. The junta’s rule is less governance than a siege in Rakhine.
Fighting still raging
Across Myanmar, crisis monitoring continues to describe clashes, displacement, airstrikes and insecurity across multiple regions, including the central heartland. That alone should make observers skeptical of the junta’s claim to have restored order.
In Karen State, resistance forces reportedly captured regime positions over the Myanmar New Year holidays in April, while fighting along the Thai-Myanmar border remained intense.
Meanwhile, in the north, Kachin State points in the same direction. The Kachin Independence Army and allied anti-junta forces have expanded their influence, seizing towns, border crossings and rare-earth mining areas.
The battle for Bhamo, near routes linking central Myanmar, northern Kachin and the China border, has become one of the country’s most important fronts.
Northern Shan State tells a different story. Operation 1027, launched by the Three Brotherhood Alliance, exposed the military’s weakness, but it also revealed the limits of gains in a war shaped by outside actors, especially China.
Formally, this is still Myanmar’s internal war. In practice, Beijing is shaping parts of the battlefield by pressuring armed groups it tacitly supports or arms, and seeking to secure trade corridors near its border.
Myanmar’s conflict is also geopolitical. The country sits between China and India, linking South and Southeast Asia. Rakhine State is especially critical: China sees Kyaukphyu as a route to the Indian Ocean, while India has connectivity interests through the Kaladan project and Sittwe port.
When the military blocks roads between Magway, Chin and Rakhine, or when the Arakan Army dominates much of Rakhine, the issue affects trade routes, border stability, humanitarian access and the geopolitical and geoeconomic calculations of Beijing and New Delhi.
Foreign governments, however, must be careful not to confuse Min Aung Hlaing’s new title with a new reality. The junta’s “transition” is not ending the war – it is simply trying to repackage it.
Peace offer changes nothing
The junta’s latest peace language should be treated with equal caution. The 100-day talks proposal is less a breakthrough than another attempt to turn military weakness into diplomatic legitimacy.
It asks resistance groups to enter a process designed by the same power that overthrew an elected government, jailed opponents and still relies on airstrikes, mass arrests, blockades and coercion to impose its will.
The swift rejection by major resistance organizations was hardly surprising. That said, none of this means the junta is about to collapse tomorrow.
Naypyitaw remains under regime command. Yangon is not on the verge of falling. Mandalay remains a core military-held city. The junta still has aircraft, prisons, patronage networks, foreign backers and the capacity to inflict immense violence, including on civilian populations.
But regime survival is not the same thing as regime victory. The war is now arguably entering a longer, harsher phase. The regime can still retake towns, block roads and punish the general population.
The resistance faces fragmentation, fatigue, shortages and the task of turning battlefield control into durable political authority. Myanmar’s revolution, however, is not waning, because the problem was never just Min Aung Hlaing or his latest attempt to dress military rule in civilian garbs.
The crisis runs much deeper, characterized by decades of military domination, the denial of democratic rights and the failure to build a genuine federal union with real equality and power-sharing. So long as those issues remain unaddressed, the resistance will endure.
Nyein Chan Aye is a Burmese journalist based in Washington, D.C., who previously worked for the BBC and Voice of America and writes on Myanmar, the US, China and regional affairs.
