Myanmar Spring Chronicle – September 13 View
(MoeMaKa) September 14, 2025
Myanmar’s fate must be solved by Myanmar people; in hard times we must help each other
Sweden, which has been supporting Myanmar’s civil society groups, human-rights monitors, and media, announced on September 11 that it will suspend aid to Myanmar beginning in the middle of next year and redirect those funds to assistance for Ukraine.
Earlier this year, when President Trump took office in the United States and moved to all but dismantle USAID’s global aid programs, Myanmar’s civil society, media organizations, and refugee camps along the borders were hit hard. Now, six months later, Sweden—one of the Scandinavian countries—has said it will wind down Myanmar-related assistance, ending it by the end of June next year.
Since the 2021 coup, Sweden has provided more than USD 170 million to Myanmar, including USD 41 million in 2024 alone. Of that, about USD 2.67 million went to media support and to human-rights protection and monitoring work.
With USAID aid halted and Sweden now suspending assistance, it is expected that Myanmar’s civil society, the international NGOs implementing Swedish-funded projects, and communities across the country that would have benefitted will all be adversely affected.
Sweden says humanitarian aid will not be affected.
In its statement, Sweden also noted that implementing aid in Myanmar has become increasingly difficult—one factor in the suspension—but the main message is that, for Sweden, the Ukraine issue has become more pressing than Myanmar.
As the Russia-Ukraine war drags on, Western Europe has grown more concerned about Russia’s threat. Meanwhile Southeast Asia’s long, complex armed conflicts and human-rights abuses in Myanmar, and the constraints of waging development assistance amid a civil war, have made it hard to justify continued programming; the perceived need to help Ukraine more has driven this decision.
Halting support for Myanmar’s human-rights education and protection work, rights-violation monitoring, the survival of independent media, and gender-equality programming is a blow to Myanmar’s democratic movement—and, conversely, a gain for the junta.
Ultimately, solutions to Myanmar’s political crisis must be decided and carried out by Myanmar people and by the organizations and forces operating inside the country. International help and funding are not the decisive factors. The images, influence, and strings pulled by powerful military and economic states can bring more harm than good to our country. Yet removing the military—an institution that has controlled state power for decades, fought ethnic armed groups for eight decades, and committed genocidal acts and war crimes—remains difficult.
After the 2021 coup, the goal became to push the military out of politics entirely, and tens of thousands joined the armed resistance. But nearly five years on, while there have been successes, final victory still feels far away.
There are challenges to forming joint commands against the dictatorship; and even where resistance forces have seized territory, holding it has become difficult. Conflicts of interest are emerging among allied groups over territorial control, administration, and access to natural-resource revenues.
These new problems must be addressed and decided on the basis of political vision, theory, and principled positions.
Disputes among armed allies must be approached as problems within a coalition; only then can we defeat the common enemy. If not, new problems and new enemies will arise, pushing the revolution’s goal further away.
Meanwhile, in this wartime period, people are struggling just to survive. It is crucial to empathize with their suffering and help as much as we can.
Given that international support for Myanmar’s democratization and liberation from dictatorship is being cut off, we need to rely more on ourselves—and strengthen mutual aid and solidarity among one another.