“First people shouted… now they react more”: #CallRussia fights Kremlin propaganda

When Vladimir Putin’s government began withholding news of its war in Ukraine, a group of Lithuanian friends moved quickly to download as many Russian phone numbers as possible. The idea was simple: hack the Kremlin’s propaganda machine by calling the Russians, one by one, to tell them what’s really going on in Ukraine. “At first, they were really angry and cried a lot, but now we feel a shift in sentiment,” said one of the founders of the #CallRussia campaign.

On March 3, one week after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine and the Kremlin began shutting down any news outlet that deviated from the regime’s account of its “special military operation,” Polius Senota, a native of Vilnius, received a phone call from a friend. “He told me he had downloaded Russian phone directories, and I immediately saw how this could be a way to reach Russians who had no idea what was really going on.”

From that moment on, it took only 120 hours for Cinota and his friends, who also involved dozens of tech experts, communication specialists and psychologists, to set up the #CallRussia media campaign. Launched on March 8, the initiative consists of a digital platform that allows Russian-speaking volunteers from around the world to communicate with 40 million Russians whose phone numbers have been encrypted and saved in its database.

#CallRussia declared on the day of its launch that “Not one conversation can beat Putin’s evil propaganda, but 40 million. Only Russians empowered with truth and compassion can stand against Putin’s lies and end this war.”

“Putin will take care of you!” Since then, Cenota said about 25,000 volunteers in 116 countries have joined the movement, having already made nearly 100,000 calls.

Cinota said that of the 150 calls he made himself so far, those 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, really angry and were yelling at you for five to seven minutes. And about a third would be kind of polite, they wouldn’t talk to you, but they would listen. They were really afraid to talk.”

Cinota said the yells were particularly hard to deal with. “Emotionally speaking, this is tough, you have to be prepared for that before you call,” he said, noting that #CallRussia has developed scripts and guidelines to help volunteers deal with often very difficult conversations.

“For example, there was this crazy lady who asked me if I knew who she was, who told me that she was Putin’s daughter and that she would call her father to me. She said, “He will take care of you.”

Hate mail attacks and hacking In the three weeks the campaign began, Cinota said his team received many hate mail and that his website was the target of several hacking attacks. We get messages like: ‘How much are you getting paid to do this’ and ‘Stop the lies’, and they are [the hackers] We’ve tried to remove the site a few times, but we always get it back up and running very quickly again.”

Since the beginning of March, Russia has passed a series of laws prohibiting the media and people alike from spreading so-called “fake news” about its war in Ukraine, including by using the term “war”. Anyone who breaks the law is subject to heavy fines and up to 15 years in prison. The Kremlin also accused the US technology giant Google and its YouTube video company of carrying out “terrorist” activities, blocking access to most international social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as many independent media outlets.

The near-total media outage means that most Russians – especially of the older generations – have over the past month been confined almost exclusively to Kremlin propaganda on state television.

“they [the respondents] They all pretty much repeat the same thing: it is a very small, targeted military operation aimed at discrediting Ukraine, that Russia is saving the Ukrainian people, that it is bringing them food and clothing. It’s like a copy of the Russian state media.”

“The conversations go on” But in the past week or so, Cinota said he and other volunteers have begun to notice a change in the tone of their calls to Russia. “There is a feeling that feelings are changing,” he said. “People are no longer shouting so much, there is more interaction. There are more people talking and the conversations are getting longer.”

Senota said that while this does not 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.

Cinota said increasing the duration of calls is one of the only ways to measure the success of the project. “What we are trying to do is convey the scale of the human tragedy so that people take a stand based on humanitarian issues rather than ideological issues, and some of our volunteers have now been able to talk to people for a very long time, sometimes for an hour.”

“The longer we talk to people, the more we can tell them what’s really going on, and we think this can have a real impact and change the way they see war,” he said. “We don’t expect that we will suddenly be able to turn the pro-war Russians into anti-war, but if we can neutralize them, those who are already opposed to the war will feel more powerful and may actually take to the streets [and protest]. “