Russian weapons, tactics seen in Ukraine are shaping Myanmar’s civil war

Russian-supplied airpower, intelligence and battlefield tactics drawn from its war in Ukraine are helping Myanmar’s military government turn the tide in a civil war now entering its sixth year.

China wields the greatest influence over Myanmar’s generals as well as the powerful ethnic armed groups based along the lengthy China-Myanmar border, but Russian-made jets, helicopters and drones have handed the military a decisive battlefield edge.

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Moscow has emerged as the Myanmar regime’s most important defence partner, according to Ian Storey, senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore and author of the book Putin’s Russia and Southeast Asia.

Storey told Al Jazeera that Russian weapons in the hands of Myanmar’s military have been used to “devastating effect” against not just rebel targets but civilian sites, including schools and hospitals.

“The death toll has been appalling,” he said.

Beyond technology and equipment, the generals also appear to have adopted Russia’s so-called “meat assaults” tactics – waves of infantry thrown at enemy defensive lines with little regard for casualties, Storey said.

Nationwide conscription, introduced in 2024, has reportedly swollen Myanmar’s army ranks by nearly 100,000 soldiers, providing the human cannon fodder such tactics demand and which first came to attention in Russia’s war of attrition in Ukraine.

“The junta has copied Russian tactics, using conscripted soldiers in human wave attacks against rebel forces,” Storey said.

Myanmar’s military chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, watches Russian honour guards passing by during a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier near the Kremlin Wall in central Moscow, in March 2025 [Alexander Zemlianichenko/Pool via Reuters]

Moscow-Myanmar embrace

The military’s 2021 coup, which ignited the ongoing civil war in Myanmar, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year later have drawn the two sanctioned countries into a much closer embrace.

The Kremlin was among the first to welcome coup leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing as a guest, while military-ruled Myanmar became the only Southeast Asian nation to fully endorse Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine and provide military assistance – reportedly, mortar shells and targeting systems for tanks.

According to Storey’s book, in early 2023, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, Lieutenant-General Kyrylo Budanov, revealed that Moscow had requested military supplies from countries using Russian-made weaponry, including Myanmar, to make up for equipment shortfalls hampering Russian combat operations in Ukraine.

A few months later, Storey writes, Russian tank manufacturer Uralvagonzavod reportedly imported optical targeting systems from Myanmar to upgrade Russian T-72 tanks that Moscow had taken out of storage, refurbished and sent to the front line in Ukraine.

Investment deals have since been signed by both sides, a Russian-built nuclear power plant proposed, and direct flights resumed after a 30-year hiatus. But weaponry remains at the heart of the relationship.

Moscow has supplied munitions, drones and anti-drone systems to Myanmar’s military that, according to the conflict monitoring group ACLED, has waged an increasingly violent campaign against adversaries and civilians alike in a civil war that has killed at least 96,000 people since the coup.

Storey identified six Russian Sukhoi Su-30 jets – the last of which arrived in December 2024 – as the military regime’s most formidable aircraft, citing witness accounts of Russian personnel servicing the aircraft in Myanmar.

According to the United Nations, air attacks were the leading cause of civilian casualties in Myanmar, with deaths from aerial raids rising 52 percent in 2025 compared with the previous year.

Conflict monitor ACLED said that between February 1, 2021 and March 13, 2026, 5,912 air strikes were recorded, with at least 4,865 reported deaths. Additionally, ACLED recorded 931 drone attacks during the same period that resulted in at least 366 reported deaths.

Earlier this month, ethnic Karen armed groups fighting the military reported that government forces killed at least 30 villagers in Bago region, located northeast of Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, including women and children. All but five were killed in aerial attacks. Later, the survivors were also reportedly killed by ground forces.

Days later, air attacks reportedly killed at least 116 prisoners of war and wounded 32 others at a detention camp in Rakhine state, according to the Arakan Army group. The attack was one of the deadliest of the conflict since the bombing of a village in the country’s Sagaing region in April 2023 that killed more than 160 people.

Last year, the military government became the first foreign buyer of Russia’s new Mi-38T assault-transport helicopters.

Together with other Russian-supplied rotorcraft, helicopters allow Myanmar’s forces to conduct strikes and swiftly move troops into position, Storey added.

Min Aung Hlaing, during a ceremony to commission new Russian helicopters into Myanmar’s air force, in Naypyidaw, in November 2025 [The Myanmar Military True News Information Team via AP]

‘Tactics of terror’

Although rebel groups battling the military gained an early advantage in the use of drones, the regime has since surged ahead in drone warfare.

Russia has equipped Myanmar with surveillance, combat and suicide drones, reportedly including the fixed-wing Albatross-M5 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), the Orlan-10E with optical and thermal imaging capable of remaining airborne for 16 hours, and the kamikaze-style VT-40 (named after slain pro-Russian war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky).

These military-grade UAVs are technically superior to the commercial off-the-shelf models used by Myanmar’s rebel forces, which Russian-supplied anti-drone systems can intercept and disable with ease, Storey said.

Myanmar’s military has also moved to institutionalise its drone force. In 2024, it established a dedicated Drone Warfare Directorate and has since deployed specialised drone training units that can be attached to existing military formations, a shift that signals drone warfare has become central to traditional armed forces’ operations.

In western Myanmar’s Chin state, Olivia Thawng Luai, former defence secretary of the Chin National Defence Force – an ethnic group fighting the military, has watched as the regime’s attacks have evolved to include unmanned aerial warfare.

Drone strikes have multiplied, Thawng Luai said, alongside a marked increase in gyrocopter and paramotor – motorised paragliders – attacks across the central drylands, which she attributes partly to the military needing to conserve jet fuel.

“But the tactics of terror against the civilian population remain the same,” she said.

Fighting around Chin state’s former capital, Falam, has seen Myanmar’s military deploy more than 1,000 soldiers in an effort to retake the strategic town, according to a source fighting on the front line.

An initial column of about 450 government soldiers sent to take the town back from Chin’s anti-regime forces was ambushed and halted. What followed was successive advances of smaller units along similar routes. Each push by the military saw heavy losses, with dozens of soldiers reported killed as they attempted to move in formation towards their objective.

Most of those sent forward were described as newly conscripted soldiers, with units repeatedly committing more troops despite mounting casualties. Footage from the area appears to show trenches at a hilltop position lined with the bodies of regime soldiers after failed assaults.

Myanmar’s rebel groups are also looking to Ukraine for lessons in how to fight a war against a larger, better-equipped adversary.

Fibre-optic first-person-view (FPV) drones, a technology that transformed the battlefield in Ukraine’s favour, have emerged as potentially the only means by which rebel forces can strike regime targets from standoff ranges of up to 20km (12.4 miles), according to Bangkok-based security analyst Anthony Davis.

Unlike conventional radio-frequency FPV drones, the fibre-optic variants are effectively immune to electronic jamming and can bypass Russian-supplied anti-drone systems, Davis said.

Since late 2025, some opposition forces have tested the technology to good effect, he said.

But what remains uncertain is whether the resistance can coordinate well enough to build a secure, commercially driven supply chain capable of sourcing and assembling components at the scale needed to make a strategic difference with drones, Davis explained.

“Over a period of six months or one year, that implies flooding the battlespace with thousands of these drones and small units trained to deploy them, something which a piecemeal approach in the initial phase will almost certainly fail to achieve,” he said.

An aerial view of Bin village in Mingin township in Sagaing region after villagers say it was set ablaze by the Myanmar military, in February 2022 [File: Reuters]

Deepening alliance

Sergei Shoigu, Putin’s close confidant and former defence minister, visited Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw in early February.

Shoigu was the first senior foreign official to visit the country following military-organised elections, which were largely dismissed as a sham to bolster military rule.

During the visit, both countries signed a four-year military cooperation agreement – the latest sign of Moscow and Naypyidaw’s growing ties, which followed Russia establishing a satellite imagery centre in the capital last year.

The satellite centre, combined with surveillance drones, has given the military a sharper picture of enemy positions on the battlefield. At sea, naval cooperation has expanded too: joint exercises have helped Myanmar’s forces develop sea resupply, naval landing and offshore bombardment capabilities, according to analysts.

The relationship has also expanded to space.

Last month, Russia announced it would help select and train Myanmar’s first astronaut.

The then-Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, left, and Min Aung Hlaing walk past an honour guard before their talks in Moscow in 2021 [File: Handout/Russian Defence Ministry via AFP]

Pyae (name changed to protect the identity), a former Myanmar military doctor who held the rank of captain, was sent to Russia’s St Petersburg on a three-year training programme in 2015, becoming one of some 600 Myanmar officers who were enrolled in Russian military institutions by 2018, according to a report in Moscow’s state-run TASS news agency.

Pyae defected from the military in March 2021 and now works with the Myanmar Defence and Security Institute – a research group formed by ex-officers in Myanmar’s military.

Continuing to maintain contact with a network of serving soldiers in Myanmar, he said reports filtering back describe “a lot” of Russian trainers conducting maintenance and instruction on Russian-supplied aircraft and equipment.

“We even have reports of sighting Chinese and Russian drone trainers near the front lines,” he said.

In his view, Russia does not see Myanmar as a particularly valued military partner.

“We are just a country they can manipulate and exploit,” he said.

From the relationship, Moscow secures steady arms revenues, as Myanmar – cut off from Western suppliers – has grown heavily dependent on Russian weapons, maintenance and upgrades. It also gained a political, economic and military foothold in Southeast Asia, among other advantages.

As Pyae sees it, without Russian support, Myanmar’s military “would have lost already”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, centre right, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, centre left, talk as Myanmar’s servicemen are reflected in glass, during the Victory Day military parade in Moscow, Russia, on May 9, 2025 [Sergei Bobylev/RIA Novosti via AP]

Moscow’s Calculus

The ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s Storey said Russia’s long-term goal in Myanmar is sustaining a market for military and energy exports while demonstrating to the West that diplomatic isolation has its limits.

“Russia values Myanmar’s friendship as a way of showing the West that attempts to isolate it diplomatically have failed,” he said.

On Myanmar, Moscow and Beijing are aligned, he added.

“Neither wish to see the junta defeated and replaced with a more Western-leaning government,” Storey said.

Yet Russia’s record of standing by its partners is poor. It failed to prevent the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and offered little meaningful support to Venezuela or Iran when they came under pressure from the United States and its ally Israel in the case of the ongoing attacks against the leadership in Tehran.

Storey is also sceptical that Moscow would act any differently if Myanmar’s military leadership faced an existential threat, as it did in late 2023 when an alliance of ethnic armies launched a sweeping offensive that made strong gains initially.

“It will simply walk away,” he said.

Pyae, the military defector and researcher, said the armed groups resisting the military regime have nothing comparable to the outside support provided by Russia.

“The sad thing is that we are not getting the support from the United States or EU countries we need to fight the military,” he said.

Moscow, he added, is partly responsible for the human cost of keeping the military in power.

“That always infuriates me, and I will always hold them accountable for the losses of our people’s lives.”