A judge in Myanmar ruled on Monday that two jailed Reuters reporters would face trial, a decision widely seen as a setback for free speech in a country led by the onetime democracy icon Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

The judge’s decision to charge the reporters with obtaining state secrets dashed any lingering hope that the reporters might be freed without having to go on trial. The reporters, U Wa Lone, 32, and U Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, face up to 14 years in prison under Myanmar’s colonial-era Official Secrets Act, and their case had been in a pretrial phase since their arrest in December.

Monday’s ruling will almost certainly provoke further international condemnation of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate whose government took over from a repressive military junta, but who has herself been widely accused of failing to protect domestic press freedoms or to stop the ethnic cleansing of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority.

In a statement on Monday, Stephen J. Adler, the president and editor in chief of Reuters, called the case against the reporters a “protracted and baseless proceeding,” adding that the decision “casts serious doubt on Myanmar’s commitment to press freedom and the rule of law.”