CallRussia is looking for volunteers to explain the truth about the war to the Russians, but the Kremlin’s propaganda works

Moscow’s possible exit from the global internet and the Kremlin’s propaganda to explain to Russians its idea about the conflict in Ukraine has led a project called #CallRussia based in Lithuania to search all over the world for people who can speak Russian and there. calls for casual phone calls to Russian citizens and openly explain Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, an effort to offset the Kremlin’s tight grip on the national media.

The Kremlin calls its actions in Ukraine a “special military operation” to disarm its neighbor and drive out the leaders it calls “neo-Nazis”. Ukraine and its Western allies say this is an unfounded pretext for an invasion of a country of 44 million people already counting thousands of dead, over two million refugees and thousands of people hiding in cities besieged under the bombing.

The project is called #CallRussia
Available to volunteers is a database with telephone numbers of 40 million Russian people and a guide on what to say during the conversation.

“These conversations are incredibly complicated, – they say to the project website – considering the propaganda and the blackouts of authoritarian information to which the Russians are subject”.

“But direct conversations are the only way to spread the truth and put an end to this war,” they explain.

Independent Russian news outlets and various foreign media outlets were forced to stop operations in Russia last week after the State Duma (parliament) passed a law that imposes a prison sentence of up to 15 years for anyone caught knowingly spreading the news. “False”.

The #CallRussia project reports that volunteers have so far made 32,000 calls to people on Russian territory between Tuesday and Wednesday from Lithuania, the United States, Germany, Great Britain, Poland and other countries.

Tomas is a volunteer, he lives in Vilnius, and made about 50 phone calls in one evening, he said that all but one of the Russians hung up or refused to talk for long.

As for the one who accepted the conversation, Tomas said in amazement, “he kept repeating phrases from Russian propaganda, namely that Ukrainians shoot civilians and bomb their own cities and the Russians are saving them from the Nazis.”

A large percentage of Russians, particularly the elderly, receive the news exclusively from the state media, and many independent media have shut down since the invasion began.

In another attempt to make Western coverage of the Russian invasion available to the Russians, three major Nordic newspapers began publishing select news articles in Russian on Thursday.

“The tragedy in Ukraine should not be communicated to the Russian public through propaganda channels,” the chief editors of Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat, Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter and Denmark’s Politiken said in a joint statement.

For its part, the Russian Foreign Ministry claims that Western media offer a partial – and often anti-Russian – view of the world, while failing to hold their leaders responsible for corruption or devastating foreign wars such as in Iraq.