Dictator
Min Aung Hlaing
Seized power in a February 2021 coup that deposed Myanmar's elected government.
Min Aung Hlaing has ruled Myanmar as head of the military junta since staging a coup on 1 February 2021 that deposed the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, hours before a new parliamentary term was set to begin. The military justified the takeover with unsubstantiated fraud claims about the 2020 election. Suu Kyi and other civilian leaders were detained and later sentenced in trials widely condemned as politically motivated.
The junta's crackdown on the resulting nationwide protest movement and armed resistance has, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, killed several thousand civilians and displaced millions, with the country now engulfed in a multi-front civil war involving numerous ethnic armed organizations and a parallel National Unity Government operating in exile.