Myanmar Spring Chronicle – August 31 Highlights
(MoeMaKa, September 1, 2025)
Blockades, Restrictions, and One of the Hardest Periods Yet for the Myanmar People
In 2025, the junta has repeatedly shifted its military strategies: imposing blockades, launching offensives, leveraging Chinese pressure to push some ethnic armed groups into ceasefires, and making it harder for the resistance to obtain ammunition. These developments have harmed not only the armed resistance forces but also inflicted deep suffering on civilians nationwide.
The junta’s new tactics—switching from defensive to offensive operations—mean that the resistance, along with the NUG’s military and administrative bodies, must also adapt their strategies, operations, and governance to meet these changes.
With only about five months until the junta’s planned elections aimed at legitimizing its rule, its forces are intensifying attacks, massing large numbers of troops, and striking key targets from multiple directions. This was seen in recent operations where the junta retook Demoso and Moebye in Karenni, Naungcho in northern Shan, and Thabeikkyin in Mandalay Region.
For the junta, these recaptures serve both to expand the territory where elections could be staged and to restore morale among supporters after repeated battlefield losses.
Civilian Suffering
For civilians, however, the consequences are devastating. Families who had rebuilt homes, businesses, and livelihoods over the past six months to a year in resistance-held areas are being uprooted again, forced into displacement for a second time.
Beyond the battlefield, the junta is also restricting consumer goods, medicines, and fuel supplies. New orders further limiting goods into Magway and Sagaing have been issued, in addition to the long-standing blockade on Rakhine. Prices are already rising as a result.
Sagaing and Magway are harder to fully seal off than Rakhine because multiple land routes exist, but tighter controls are still driving up costs. Goods bound for Kachin—food, fuel, and medicine—must pass through Sagaing. Some parts of the Mandalay–Myitkyina road are under junta control, while most are held by the resistance. Both sides impose “taxes” on goods and passengers, extracting revenue to fund their operations and buy ammunition.
Burdens on Trade and the Public
A recent media article, “The Detour That Discourages the Revolution,” described how in late 2024 local administrative bodies under the resistance ordered traders to use alternative back roads instead of the main Mandalay–Myitkyina highway, since that route generated tax revenue for the junta.
This forced traders to take 100-mile detours, enduring flooded mud tracks in the rainy season and choking dust in the dry season. Trucks often required tractors to pull them through, costing hundreds of thousands of kyats. Travelers faced long delays and soaring prices for basic food and water.
The article argued these decisions were mismanagement—policies that unintentionally caused hardship and frustration among civilians, eroding morale toward the revolution.
A Dual Responsibility
The junta enforces blockades with no concern for civilian suffering. But resistance groups also risk alienating the public if they demand excessive taxes beyond what is reasonable to sustain the fight.
Looking Ahead
In the months to come, Myanmar’s people face:
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Continued offensives and counteroffensives
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Further waves of displacement
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Shortages and skyrocketing prices of essential goods
The struggle is not only military—it is a test of whether resistance forces can balance their survival needs with the burden already crushing the population.
👉 In short: The junta’s blockades and offensives are worsening daily hardship, but resistance taxation policies can also deepen civilian frustration. For the public, this is becoming one of the hardest periods yet in the long revolution.