Who Is Arming Myanmar?

In mid-May, Tom Andrews, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, published a report highlighting the challenges that Western nations face in choking off the flow of arms to the country’s military. The report did not make for encouraging reading. It claimed that despite the imposition of extensive sanctions against the junta and its leaders by the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and European Union, among other nations, Myanmar’s military has still managed to import at least $1 billion in arms and other materiel since its coup of February 2021. 

The report accused a number of foreign governments – it specifically calls out Russia, China, Singapore, Thailand, and India – of enabling this trade “through a combination of outright complicity, lax enforcement of existing bans, and easily circumvented sanctions,” in the words of a press release announcing the report’s release.

This is taking place despite the growing atrocities that have accompanied the deadly struggle between the junta and its multifarious opponents in the more than two years since the coup. In late January, the rights group Human Rights Watch reported that “junta forces have been responsible for attacks on civilians that amount to war crimes against ethnic minority populations in Kachin, Karen, Karenni, and Shan States. The military has used ‘scorched earth’ tactics, burning villages in Magway and Sagaing Regions.” 

The military has engaged in aerial attacks on resistance strongholds, most recently on April 11, when two bombs killed at least 160 people, including nearly 40 children, in an attack on Pazigyi village in Sagaing Region. The bombs were dropped from a Russian Yak-130 light attack aircraft. Two Russian-made Mi-35 attack helicopters arrived soon afterward to attack those who survived the initial assault.

“These weapons, and the materials to manufacture more of them, have continued to flow uninterrupted to the Myanmar military despite overwhelming evidence of its responsibility for atrocity crimes,” the report stated. 

The report argued that a “staggering” volume of goods has been sent to the Myanmar military since the coup. Using trade data, Andrews identified more than 12,500 separate transfers. These include shipments of “fighter jets, attack helicopters, reconnaissance and attack drones, advanced missile systems, tank upgrades, radio and communication equipment, radar complexes, and components for naval ships.” It also involved shipments of spare parts, as well as the machinery and raw materials – “including steel, aluminum, copper, brass, lead, certain chemicals and lubricants, and rubber” – that the Myanmar military’s Directorate of Defense Industries has used to manufacture its own weapons. 

The bulk of the transfers came from entities, some owned by or connected to the state, in Russia and China. The report claimed that Myanmar’s military or agents acting on its behalf have received $406 million worth of weaponry from Russia and $267 million from China, including from state-owned entities in both countries. 

To take one example from the report, at least $227 million of materiel came from Rosoboronexport, Moscow’s state-owned arms exporter, which has transferred Su-30 fighter jets, supplies for MiG-29 jets, and rocket launch systems to Myanmar, the report said.

State-owned entities in India made a smaller volume of transfers, and companies in Singapore, India, and Thailand were also involved in transfers to the military. As the report noted, “arms dealing organizations appear to be using the jurisdictions of Thailand and Singapore, and specifically the banking and shipping sectors there, to facilitate arms transfers.”  Singapore-based entities shipped $254 million worth of arms and materiel to Myanmar’s military, the report said, despite the city-state’s claims that it has “worked to prevent the flow of arms” into the country. 

Andrews said that the report’s findings demonstrated the failure of Western sanctions to choke off the Tatmadaw's supply of weapons and materiel. “The Myanmar military and its arms dealers have figured out how to game the system,” Andrews said. “That’s because sanctions are not being adequately enforced and because arms dealers linked to the junta have been able to create shell companies to avoid them.”

While Andrews concluded the report in the optimistic framing that is typical of human rights advocacy – he called for U.N. member states to “step up and stop the flow of arms” and impose a complete ban on the arms transfers to Myanmar’s military, among other things – history does not offer much hope for optimism. 

There is certainly further progress that can be made to reduce the flow of arms to Myanmar’s armed forces, with beneficial flow-on effects, but a total cut-off is very unlikely. If there was ever a time that Western nations could have successfully achieved this, it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the United States enjoyed unchallenged global power, China was still a middling economic player, and Russia remained lodged in its post-Soviet economic morass. The global distribution of power has changed radically since, shifting the world form unipolarity to multipolarity, and reducing the leverage of the U.S. and the wealthy democracies of the West to set the global, let along regional, agenda.

Motivated by their bids for regional primacy (in China’s case) and a desire to unpick the U.S.-led international order (in Russia’s), there is little indication that either nation will heed the U.N.’s pleas to halt their shipments of arms to Myanmar.

The only real way to bring down the military junta is to help arm the Myanmar resistance directly – but that course of action would bring its own host of risks and dangers, not least of which would be to threaten to turn the country into a “new Cold War” proxy battlefield. All of this makes it likely that Myanmar’s conflict will continue for another two years, if not longer.