Myanmar's military government controls just 21 percent of the country's territory, according to CFR's Global Conflict Tracker (updated June 17, 2026), while ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) and resistance forces now hold 42 percent. The numbers alone are a stark measure of how far the Tatmadaw's strategic position has eroded since the coup of February 1, 2021 triggered the current civil war.

The territorial inversion is not sudden. Since 2023, EAOs have been expanding operations well beyond their traditional ethnic homelands — the Shan, Chin, Rakhine, and Kachin border corridors where they had contained their activities for decades. ACLED analysis from November 2024 documented this shift explicitly: armed organisations taking new ground and projecting force into zones the Tatmadaw long treated as secure. The People's Defence Force (PDF), the armed wing of the National Unity Government, has operated alongside these EAOs in a loose but effective coalition — a constellation of actors with different long-term objectives but a shared near-term enemy.

The human cost of that expanding battlefield was quantified in a February 2025 UN report: more than 1,800 civilians killed in 2024, the highest annual toll since the coup. Airstrikes on villages, artillery assaults on populated areas, and what international monitors have documented as systematic sexual and gender-based violence have accompanied the military's attempts to hold or reclaim territory. A joint statement issued January 31, 2025, signed by a broad coalition of governments, formally condemned the junta's escalating violence against civilians and its human rights violations.

The junta's conduct following a major earthquake in April 2025 illustrated the gap between its public posture and battlefield behaviour. After announcing a ceasefire ostensibly to allow humanitarian access, the Tatmadaw continued airstrikes and artillery assaults within days — a pattern Reuters documented with conflict-incident data. ASEAN leaders, meeting in May 2025, issued a statement expressing deep concern over the escalation and calling for an extended ceasefire, though the bloc's consensus-based structure has historically constrained it from applying coercive pressure on a member state.

A Compounding Crisis

The military dimension sits inside a wider collapse. The UN described Myanmar in January 2025 as facing an unprecedented "polycrisis" — economic implosion, intensifying armed conflict, climate-linked disasters, and deepening poverty operating simultaneously and reinforcing each other. The kyat has shed most of its value since 2021. Banking restrictions have severed large parts of the population from formal finance. Food insecurity is acute in conflict zones, and displacement — already in the millions — continues to grow.

That layered fragility matters for assessing what the territorial data actually means. A junta controlling 21 percent of the country is not simply a military force losing ground; it is an administrative structure losing its ability to tax, conscript, supply itself, and govern. The Tatmadaw has responded in part by doubling down on air power, which requires less ground presence but inflicts indiscriminate damage — and further hardens civilian populations against the regime.

For the resistance, the picture is more complex than the territorial gains suggest. ACLED's November 2024 analysis flagged the fault lines between EAOs pursuing ethnic self-determination agendas and PDF units nominally committed to a federal democratic framework. These are not the same project. As the junta weakens, competition over post-conflict political arrangements and resource-rich territory is already surfacing in some corridors. Unity forged against a common enemy tends to fracture when that enemy begins to lose.

The international community's toolkit looks thin. Targeted sanctions on junta leadership and arms-embargo discussions have not materially degraded the Tatmadaw's operational capacity, partly because key suppliers sit outside Western jurisdictional reach. ASEAN's five-point consensus, agreed in 2021, has never been implemented. The UN Special Envoy's office has limited access. Humanitarian corridors depend on the cooperation of an actor that continued bombing during a self-declared earthquake ceasefire.

What the 21-versus-42 percent territorial split does clarify is the direction of travel. Five years in, the junta has not succeeded in suppressing the insurgency; the insurgency has not yet assembled the political and military coherence needed to govern what it holds. Myanmar is moving through a prolonged interregnum — destructive, expensive in human life, and without a near-term resolution in sight.