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When Vladimir Putin’s government started blacking out news of its war in Ukraine, a group of Lithuanian friends quickly moved to download as many Russian phone numbers as they could. The idea was simple: to break through the Kremlin’s propaganda machine by calling Russians, one by one, to tell them what was really going on in Ukraine. “At the beginning, they were really angry and yelled a lot, but now we’re sensing a shift in sentiment,” one of the founders of the #CallRussia campaign said.
On March 3, one week after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine and the Kremlin began to shut down any news outlet that deviated from the regime-scripted narrative of its “special military operation”, Vilnius native Paulius Senuta received a phone call from a friend. “He told me he’d downloaded Russian phone directories, and I immediately saw how this could be a way to get through to Russians who have no idea about what is really going on.”
From that moment on, it took only 120 hours for Senuta and his friends, who also reeled in dozens of tech experts, communications specialists and psychologists, to set up the #CallRussia information campaign. The initiative was rolled out on March 8, and consists of a digital platform that allows Russian-speaking volunteers from across the world to connect with the 40 million Russians whose telephone numbers have been coded and saved into its database.
“One conversation cannot overcome Putin’s evil propaganda, but 40 million might. Russians empowered with truth and compassion are the only ones who can stand up against Putin’s lies and end this war,” #CallRussia announced on its launch day.
‘Putin will take care of you!’
Since then, Senuta said some 25,000 volunteers in 116 countries have joined the movement, having already placed almost 100,000 calls.
Senuta said that out of the near 150 calls he has made himself so far, the ones made in the first few days of the campaign were by far the hardest. “There were basically two types of interactions. About two-thirds of the people were really very angry and they would yell at you for like five to seven minutes. And about a third would just be kind of polite, they wouldn’t talk to you, but they would listen. They were really afraid to speak.”
Senuta said the yellers have been particularly difficult to deal with. “Emotionally it’s hard, you have to be prepared for that before you call,” he said, and noted that #CallRussia has developed both scripts and guidelines to help its volunteers handle the often very challenging conversations.
“For example, there was this crazy lady who asked me if I knew who she was, and who told me that she was Putin’s daughter and that she was going to call her father on me. ‘He will take care of you,’ she said.”
Hate mail and hacking attacks
In the three weeks the campaign has been running, Senuta said his team has received several hateful messages and that its website has been the target of numerous hacking attacks. “We get messages like: ‘How much are you being paid for doing this’ and ‘stop the lies’, and they [the hackers] have tried to take down the site a few times, but we always get it back up running pretty quickly again.”
Since the beginning of March, Russia has passed a flurry of laws banning both media and people from spreading so-called “fake news” about its war in Ukraine, including by use of the term “war”. Anyone breaching the law risks heavy fines and up to 15 years in prison. The Kremlin has also accused US tech giant Google and its video subsidiary YouTube of conducting “terrorist” activities, and has blocked access to most international social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as several independent media.
The near total media outage means that most Russians – especially those of older generations – have for the past month almost exclusively been limited to the Kremlin propaganda broadcast by state TV.
“They [the respondents] are all pretty much repeating the same thing: that it’s a very small, targeted military operation aimed at denazifying Ukraine, that Russia is saving the Ukrainian people, and that it is bringing them food and clothes. It’s like a copy-paste of Russian state media.”
‘The conversations are getting longer’
But in the past week or so, Senuta said both he and other volunteers have begun to note a change in tone in their calls to Russia. “There’s a sense that the sentiment is changing,” he said. “People aren’t shouting as much anymore, and there’s more interaction. There are more people talking and the conversations are getting longer.”
Senuta said that even though this doesn’t necessarily mean that the majority of Russians have suddenly changed their minds about what they think is happening in Ukraine, it is a very positive sign.
Senuta said that the increasing duration of the calls is one of the only ways to measure the success of the project. “What we’re trying to do is to convey the scale of the human tragedy so that people take a stance based on the humanitarian issues rather than the ideological issues, and some of our volunteers have now been able to talk to people for quite long, sometimes for an hour.”
“The longer we can talk to people, the more we can actually tell them about what is really happening, and we think that this can have a real impact and change the way they see the war,” he said. “We’re not expecting to be able to suddenly turn pro-war Russians into anti-war, but if we can neutralise them, those that actually are against the war would feel more empowered and might actually go out into the streets [and protest].”
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