Suu Kyi, who is serving a 27-year sentence imposed by a junta court, has largely been hidden from view since she was detained by the junta as they seized power in a putsch that has plunged the country into turmoil.

Myanmar’s junta denied Wednesday a request by former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen for talks with democracy leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been in detention since a 2021 coup.

Suu Kyi, the figurehead of Myanmar’s struggle against military rule, has largely been hidden from view since the junta detained her as they seized power in a putsch that has plunged the country into turmoil.

Myanmar’s military government has rebuffed numerous requests by foreign leaders and diplomats to meet the 78-year-old, who has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for a multitude of offences her allies say she did not commit. Suu Kyi has reportedly suffered health problems during more than three years in detention.

Hun Sen, who stepped down to make way for his son last year after nearly four decades in charge of Cambodia, spoke on Tuesday via video telephone call with junta chief Min Aung Hlaing, the general who led the coup against Suu Kyi’s elected government.

The Cambodian prime minister said he had requested a meeting with Suu Kyi during the video talks with Min Aung Hlaing and that the general agreed to give the request “high consideration”.

But in an audio message released by the military’s information team, junta spokesman Zaw Min Tun said Myanmar’s military government had “no reason to facilitate it at this moment”.

The military would hold promised and much-delayed fresh elections “without fail”, he said, without giving details. “We are going to avoid matters which can delay or disturb future processes.”

Hun Sen, who is now president of Cambodia’s Senate, has no official mediation role in Myanmar’s post-coup conflict and it was not immediately clear why he had sought access to Suu Kyi.

It is also not clear where Suu Kyi is being held and her family and lawyers say they have no access to her. The military maintains she has received due process.

Suu Kyi’s only known encounter with a foreign envoy since her detention came last July, when the then Thai foreign minister Don Pramudwinai said he had met her for over an hour.

The junta said last month that she was being “given necessary care” as temperatures in the military-built capital Naypyidaw, where she is believed to be detained, hit around 40 degrees celsius (104 Fahrenheit).

The military launched its 2021 coup citing unsubstantiated claims of massive electoral fraud in 2020 elections won resoundingly by Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD). It has pushed back a timetable to hold fresh polls several times.

Myanmar is locked in a civil war between the military on one side and, on the other, a loose alliance of established ethnic minority rebels and an armed resistance movement formed out of the junta’s bloody crackdown on anti-coup protests.

The conflict is the biggest challenge facing the junta since it first seized power in the former British colony in 1962, with battles on several fronts to quell uprisings and stabilise an economy that has wilted since the coup.