Ghost Unions of Belarus: Civil Resistance in the Shadows

In the authoritarian shadows of Eastern Europe, where public dissent is outlawed and civil society crushed beneath the heel of the state, an invisible form of resistance endures. In Belarus — where mass protests once filled the streets and now silence reigns — resistance movements have shifted not to the hills or forests, but into the very machinery of the state itself: the railways, factories, and plants that keep the regime alive.

These new partisans don’t wear masks or carry signs. They don’t march. They don’t shout. Instead, they work slowly, quietly, and with deliberate inefficiency. They call themselves many things, but to those who observe them from afar, they are something new in the history of modern dissent: ghost unions.

The Broken Hope of 2020

The Belarusian presidential elections of August 2020 triggered the largest wave of public resistance in the country’s post-Soviet history. Massive, peaceful demonstrations surged across Minsk and other cities in response to what was widely seen as a fraudulent re-election of President Alexander Lukashenko. For weeks, citizens of all ages joined a diverse and largely nonviolent protest movement that called for free elections, the release of political prisoners, and the restoration of civil rights.

Workers played a pivotal role. Spontaneous walkouts erupted in key state-run enterprises such as the Minsk Tractor Works and BelAZ, the national truck manufacturer. For a regime that prided itself on centralized industrial control, this was a seismic shock.

But it didn’t last.

Within months, the Lukashenko regime unleashed a methodical crackdown. Riot police, internal security forces, and KGB agents arrested tens of thousands, tortured detainees, and dismantled opposition structures. Independent labor unions — previously allowed to exist on the margins — were labeled “extremist organizations,” their leaders imprisoned or exiled. The Belarusian Congress of Democratic Trade Unions (BKDP) and its affiliates were formally dissolved by the Supreme Court in July 2022. The last remaining visible infrastructure of organized dissent was forced underground.

And underground it went.

What Is a Ghost Union?

A ghost union is not a formal institution. It has no building, banner, or spokesperson. It cannot call a strike, circulate a petition, or register with the state. In Belarus, all of those things are now crimes.

Instead, a ghost union is a network of individuals — usually coworkers — who coordinate informal resistance within their workplace. The term first emerged in Belarusian exile media following the dismantling of the Belarusian Independent Trade Union (BITU) and the REP Union in 2022. Although stripped of legal status, the movements did not dissolve. They changed shape.

Ghost unions utilize encrypted communication platforms — Telegram (particularly the Cyber Partisans’ modified “Partisan Telegram” app with voice-changing and passwordless modes), Signal, or Wickr — to organize their actions. Members rely on pseudonyms, burner devices, and prearranged signals to avoid detection. Rather than large, disruptive strikes, they emphasize tactics designed to degrade output subtly: deliberate mistakes in paperwork, unhurried repairs, misrouted freight, extended sick leaves, and coordinated underperformance.

The goal isn’t to stop production, but to undermine it just enough to erode state capacity while avoiding retribution.

Tactical Resistance in the Workplace

Unlike political protest, workplace resistance is harder to police. It is difficult to distinguish deliberate sabotage from incompetence or fatigue, especially in aging post-Soviet industrial systems already prone to dysfunction.

Take the Belarusian Railway, one of the key state enterprises that became an early target of coordinated disruption. In late 2021 and early 2022, a covert group of rail workers and sympathetic IT professionals calling themselves the “Cyber Partisans” launched a series of digital and physical sabotage operations. They disabled signal systems, deleted routing data, and slowed troop movements as Belarusian rail infrastructure was being used to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The group used modified ransomware to encrypt the railway’s internal databases, offering to restore the system only if 50 political prisoners were released — a demand that went unmet but demonstrated the operational sophistication of decentralized resistance.

More quietly, anonymous rail workers began “losing” cargo, rerouting trains, and misapplying maintenance procedures. In March 2022, Lukashenko himself accused “terrorists” of damaging signaling cabinets and warned of “traitors within” the national workforce. At least 11 partisans were detained near Babrujsk after government security forces fired on individuals setting fire to railway signals.

The regime responded with sweeping arrests and new counter-insurgency tools. Facial recognition systems were deployed in railyards. A new class of “economic extremism” was codified into law, criminalizing not only physical sabotage but also poor performance deemed ideologically motivated. Yet the ghost unions persisted.

Because their actions are incremental and decentralized, they are nearly impossible to eliminate. In one Minsk electrical plant, anonymous reports suggested that workers were intentionally overloading circuits and slowing distribution line diagnostics, contributing to recurring local outages. In 2024, the Cyber Partisans demonstrated the vulnerability of state industry by penetrating the network of Grodno Azot, Belarus’s largest state-run fertilizer manufacturer — accessing internal cameras, documents, emails, and even infiltrating heating systems that were not connected to the internet. The group claimed they found a way to completely shut down the plant but refrained for ethical reasons.

Those inside the factories call it тихий саботаж — quiet sabotage.

Lessons from History: From Solidarity to Silence

To understand ghost unions, one must look to their historical ancestors — not in Belarus, but in Poland.

In the early 1980s, Poland’s Solidarity movement operated under intense repression after the imposition of martial law. Its leaders were jailed. Its offices were shuttered. Yet in the shipyards and steel mills, workers continued to sabotage production, distribute underground newspapers, and coordinate walkouts via church networks and trusted peers. It was in this space — between public silence and private defiance — that real resistance lived. Solidarity grew to 10 million members and combined worker non-cooperation with the creation of parallel social institutions, eventually forcing free elections in 1989 and triggering the cascade that ended Communist rule across Eastern Europe.

Belarus’s ghost unions embody a similar doctrine: strategic patience, low-profile action, and cultural endurance.

They are not seeking the rapid collapse of the regime. They seek to drain its capacity to function. In authoritarian systems reliant on centralized production, even minor disruptions carry exponential consequences. A miscalibrated machine or a delayed shipment can ripple through the chain of control, forcing costly inspections and drawing resources into internal security rather than state development.

It is a war of attrition, not ideology.

The State Strikes Back

Lukashenko’s regime has responded with innovations of its own. Internal workplace informants — sometimes incentivized with bonuses or pardons — have become common. Workers are required to sign loyalty statements. New surveillance tools have been deployed, including keyboard tracking software and proximity monitors. Factories are routinely visited by OMON officers posing as safety inspectors.

The state also benefits from deep support from Russia. FSB advisors reportedly assist in counterintelligence operations, while economic aid allows Minsk to replace resistant workers with short-term contractors. In 2023, Lukashenko publicly stated that “subversive activity by the West through our labor collectives has failed” — a sign, perhaps, of how deeply he fears it.

The legal architecture of repression has also evolved. By May 2025, 49 independent trade unionists had been officially designated as “extremists” by the state, and nine had additionally been classified as “terrorists” — a legal escalation that carries severe sentencing implications and extends the regime’s reach to family members and associates. As the UN Special Rapporteur on Belarus reported in October 2025, the country engages in a systematic practice of violating human rights in labor and employment, with all independent unions banned and the sole remaining federation — the state-controlled FTUB — lacking any genuine independence.

Yet repression cannot fully extinguish economic resistance. In many cases, the more aggressive the state becomes, the more quietly determined its workers grow.

The Role of the Diaspora

With so many union leaders in exile, the Belarusian diaspora plays a critical role in sustaining ghost unions. From Lithuania, Poland, and beyond, former activists coordinate media campaigns, transmit encrypted updates, and gather testimony from inside Belarus.

Organizations like BYSOL (Belarus Solidarity Foundation), the Coordination Council for the Belarusian Opposition, and Salidarnast e.V. — an organization founded specifically by exiled trade union leaders — fund families of repressed workers, maintain secure communication channels, and issue international reports documenting labor-based resistance. BYPOL, a group of former Belarusian police officers working against Lukashenko’s government, has expanded its operations to include military training of volunteers in Polish camps, claiming 200,000 registered participants prepared for future coordinated resistance actions.

International unions and watchdogs — including the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the International Labour Organization (ILO), and multiple UN Special Rapporteurs — have issued repeated condemnations of Belarus’s crackdown on organized labor. The ILO’s 2023 invocation of Article 33 of its Constitution — only the second such action in the organization’s history (after Myanmar in 2001) — represented the strongest available institutional response, calling on member states to restrict trade and cooperation with Belarus. Despite these measures, the regime has refused to cooperate with the ILO’s Special Envoy, whose mandate was extended through 2026.

Still, visibility matters. The more the world recognizes ghost unions as legitimate actors of civil resistance — not just internal dissidents or “malcontents” — the more they can leverage external moral and material support.

The Strategic Value of Invisible Resistance

For analysts and practitioners of irregular warfare and resistance doctrine, Belarus’s ghost unions offer an important case study in strategic invisibility.

This model is particularly valuable in repressive regimes with high surveillance capabilities. Where marches invite mass arrest and strikes invite criminal prosecution, ghost unions offer a third path: constant, undetectable friction.

They also illustrate the utility of economic sabotage as a form of subversion. When executed with care, such tactics can wear down an authoritarian system’s legitimacy and operational capacity without triggering violent reprisals or international condemnation. The Cyber Partisans’ approach — maintaining long-term access to state networks while exercising restraint in their use — demonstrates how digital and physical resistance can operate on parallel tracks within the same strategic framework.

As future resistance movements emerge in post-Soviet or similarly repressive environments, the Belarusian model may well become a foundational reference.

Conclusion: The Revolution That Stayed to Work

Not all resistance waves end in victory — or in visible martyrdom. Some are forced underground, not into dormancy, but into evolution.

In Belarus, the revolutionaries didn’t disappear. They returned to work.

But they brought resistance with them — into the steel presses, the switchboards, the circuit rooms, and the HR offices. Into the time clocks and the supply orders. Into the routines that keep the regime alive.

The September 2025 release of Yarashuk and Fiadynich offered a rare point of light, but the broader picture remains bleak. Approximately twenty trade unionists still sit in prison. New criminal cases target exiled leaders. Children are being removed from targeted families. And Lukashenko, having secured a sixth term in January 2025, shows no interest in reconciliation.

The ghost unions of Belarus may never appear in the headlines. But they are there. Working less. Working slower. Refusing, in silence.

And sometimes, that’s all it takes to keep the flame alive.

The original reporting in this article draws on publications from the International Trade Union Confederation, the Viasna Human Rights Centre, Amnesty International, the Solidarity Center, BYSOL, and the European Economic and Social Committee. Cyber Partisans operations are documented by Recorded Future News, CEPA, and the group’s own official portal. International labor standards context from the Human Rights Watch World Report and U.S. State Department Country Report on Belarus (2024).

The Resistance Hub Staff

Articles published under The Resistance Hub Staff byline reflect a collaborative process that combines open-source research, human analysis, and AI-assisted drafting. Structured prompts and defined editorial theses guide the use of AI, but all content is reviewed, edited, and finalized by human editors with subject-matter expertise in irregular warfare, resistance studies, and critical infrastructure security. Reader contributions are also published under this byline, and identified in the article.

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