If you speak Russian, call Russia and tell them what is happening in Ukraine

What a silly plan. Consider the reverse situation.<p>You are a US citizen, and your phone randomly rings. On the other line, there is a guy speaking English with a heavy russian accent:<p>&quot;Hello. I call from Russia. This website I find ask me to call and inform you of real happenings in Ukraine. Your media full of lies. Trust me. Look. I have pen.&quot;<p>Yeah I can totally see Americans taking up arms against their government after a couple of spam calls like this.

I am from Czechoslovakia, trying to imagine what would happen in 1980s if people then were getting unexpected political calls from unknown foreigners. They would mostly assume it is a secret service provocation and react accordingly. Yes that&#x27;s hard to believe for westerners that your own state would do such nasty stuff to you, but it was commonplace then.<p>Shortwave radio station that is possible to tune to in Moscow and beyond, where they can listen to people they have known before, would have much bigger impact. Like Radio Free Europe did.

I would probably advise against doing this. There have been rumors of Russian police looking through citizen&#x27;s phones for indications that they are engaging with western viewpoints on the &quot;special operation&quot;. And the penalty for such activities is quite high right now.<p>A random phone call from a U.S. citizen might look suspicious, and I don&#x27;t imagine Russian police are giving much benefit of the doubt right now.

If you want to help the protest movements in Russia, support the russian opposition, NGO&#x27;s that provide help to people arrested during demonstrations (13750 as of today) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ovdinfo.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ovdinfo.org&#x2F;</a> , and independent journalists who are currently escaping the country to continue their work abroad in relative safety.<p>Calling random people, messing with the russian internet, targeting the russian opposition&#x2F;journalists escaping the country who just had all their cards turned off because of the visa&#x2F;masterkard decisions is simply counterproductive.

And how do I know what is happening there?<p>I&#x27;m partial toward the people who got invaded but I cannot even verify the stories and sources to a reliable degree. Simply because I lack the resources.<p>Having a clear bias (support for one side) makes it cognitively even worse.<p>So I have two choices:<p>1. Risking telling &quot;noble&quot; lies because in the grand scheme of things Russia (bad actor) has invaded Ukraine (good actor) so even if I&#x27;m wrong in some things my intentions are good.<p>2. Calling Russians and trying also to hear their side of the story and with an open mind figure out together how to bring this war to an quick end.<p>I believe the vast majority of Russians and Ukrainians have good intentions and want peace.<p>But borrowing from the proverb &quot;<i>The road to hell is paved with good intentions</i>&quot; one has to have a way of self-correcting i.e. hearing the other side.<p>So call Russians and tell them your side of the story but don&#x27;t pretend to know &quot;better&quot;.

This is great! We should start to call other countries about what is happening in Yemen right now.

There are plenty of Russians on Youtube commenting under pleas posted by Ukrainians asking them to help stop the war. And there are plenty of videos taken by people on the ground in Ukraine that show what&#x27;s going on. But due to the way Youtube works, the Russian users are not very likely to come across those videos.<p>Consider interacting with them by replying with links to the videos.<p>If somebody from Youtube is reading this, I understand that you need to curb spammers who post a lot. But if you could somehow help with this effort, it might actually help change the public opinion in Russia.

When US invaded Iraq (because of false claims about weapons of mass destruction), people did not call random numbers in America. And ordinary Americans did not do anything to stop their government from invading another country on false premises.

Phone call is sort term, high effort, and maybe even annoying to those pro-Russians.<p>Just a thought: I been viewing the evidences of Russian war crimes (photograph, video) that people posted on Twitter since the very beginning of the invasion. A lot&#x27;s of them are real and fact-checked.<p>Maybe it could be a good idea to setup some sort of online and physical memorial to show the timelines of how each single innocent people lost their life in the invasion, completely neutrally and uncensored, only tell the story, no decoration.<p>My rational is this: it is just impossible to convert the entire Russian population to be peace-loving, let&#x27;s just face it, it won&#x27;t happen as long as the regime needs brainless tools. But for the curious ones who really wants to understand, the memorial can plant the seed in their head. Every 0.0000001% counts.

Why aren&#x27;t russians telling eachother? At least a fraction of russians read and trust trustworthy (international) news sources, but if their peers won&#x27;t believe them, why would they believe me if I called them?<p>Russia isn&#x27;t North Korea. Yes there has been a tightening lately and all <i>easily</i> accessible media has been propaganda for a long time. But that doesn&#x27;t mean any Russian can&#x27;t - with some effort - consume a wide selection of news. And that&#x27;s their <i>damn responsibility</i> to do so. For example, if you are a soldier asked to go fight in a country, it&#x27;s your responsibility to read news from other countries before you leave. Otherwise, how can you be sure you know whether the orders are even legal?<p>We need to stop giving a pass to russians because they have an authoritarian leadership and strict media control. It&#x27;s very easy to say this from an armchair in a liberal democracy but I&#x27;m still going to say it: Russians have a responsibility to protest the regime now, carrying the personal risk despite perhaps having little to no personal responsibility. Else they have the blood of Ukrainians on their hands.<p>And the same applies to anyone else in an armchair whose armchair is in room temperature because of russian oil or gas.

No one thought about or cared about Ukraine a month ago. Now it&#x27;s everyone&#x27;s greatest cause of their lives. Meanwhile, I&#x27;m certain there are many atrocities the ruling class isn&#x27;t forcing your focus on that you don&#x27;t care about at all. All of this feigned outrage is so fake.

Those who know, already know. If they do not know or knowingly support the war, your call will not magically change their mind.<p>If you are a citizen of a European country, call your government and ask to help Ukraine instead. Drop humanitarian supplies, people experience food shortages. Send in troops, the more losses Russia suffers the harder it is for the government to maintain the pretense of normalcy. No one likes fighting a losing war.

But I don&#x27;t really see the message the caller is supposed to relay once they dial in.<p>You are supposed to relay stories about bombed hospitals and shelled houses that you&#x27;ve either picked up from the media a day ago, or just from the web site&#x27;s caption text. Are you ready to answer the question &quot;what were you doing in the last 8 years&quot;? Are you ready to even understand it? What about Alley of Angels, are you ready to talk about it?<p>I would expect there would be some &quot;weaponized&quot; facts at a minimum, or you may be losing in that artillery duel quite fast. Because Russian TV and state media does supply a lot of weaponized facts of its own.<p>Consider telling your counterparty that Russia prevents civilians from getting out from besieged cities, and they respond &quot;I&#x27;ve just saw on the TV that Ukrainian far-right batallions are not letting their civilians out to use them as human shield&quot;. How are you going to reason from that point? I&#x27;m honestly interested because I don&#x27;t know whose truth is there.

Just to add up to comments explaining why it won&#x27;t work. I&#x27;m from Kazakhstan, but I&#x27;m more or less indistinguishable from Russian. Russians in Kazakhstan basically consume the same media Russia citizens do. So I can&#x27;t even persuade my own relatives there that it is obvious we are bad guys right not. Not some random people, but my own mother believes TV more than me. Because it is easier to believe, it is almost impossible for us (anyone probably) that we became evil. And you can&#x27;t change that by spam calls, you probably make it worse. People who can accept other opinions still have access to other sources, it is not (yet) N. Korea. We need more protests and (sadly) more sanctions, preferably against individuals. And truth, not anti-propaganda. More coverage of current situation in cities, and less &#x27;russian ship go f* yourself&#x27;

There’s a site for texting. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1920.in" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1920.in</a><p>Donno if it helps tho. Saw a tweet about it and lots of people were saying they were sending texts and getting replies.

Also, try to reach out to fellow technology professionals inside Russia and help them to find a way to get out.

I&#x27;d assume that the majority of foreign calls are wiretapped and automatically converted to text for keyword searches. Russia gets to go directly into the server&#x2F;networking rooms to install their black boxes.<p>So self-censor certain keywords... as you normally would on the internet.

If you speak English, call USA&#x2F;EU and tell them what is happening in Russia <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_XLwHzZo_mo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_XLwHzZo_mo</a>

I feel very skeptical that a stranger can quickly change someone&#x27;s mind over a phone call. Most people expect some kind of scam or sales pitching when a stranger is calling them.<p>I called a lot of my friends in Russia and they are mostly aware of what&#x27;s going on. But they all live in big cities. The problem is large rural population and smaller towns, which is majority of the population in Russia. They still seem to support Putin no matter what.

This and all the cancel type activists seem like an extraordinary case of “do-something-itis”.<p>How does it impact Ukrainians if a cat competition bans the breed “Russian Blue”[1]?<p>As others on this thread have pointed out, an anonymous call from a foreign stranger is extremely unlikely to change minds on a political issue (we can’t even change the political opinions of family members at Thanksgiving Dinner). Seems like a waste of effort.<p>Doing something meaningful is HARD. You can’t just make a phone call or a tweet or TikTok or put a Ukrainian flag emoji in your social media profile. Acting out like pouring out Russian vodka may actually be harming people who support your cause; maybe the CEO of the vodka company is a Putin opponent. Maybe the vodka isn’t even from Russia [2](most isn’t). You don’t know. You can’t know how your virtue signaling is going to harm people, but I promise you it’s not going accomplish your stated goals (prove me wrong with a counter-example showing how this stopped a war). At best, it will make already like minded people like you more.<p>You have to obtain political power which is mostly done by organizing other like minded people and&#x2F;or donations to influencable people with power. You have to amass enough power to make the change you want effected. Then you have to wield that power effectively, and hope that your opponents aren’t more successful in their opposing activities.<p>There’s no short cut.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com.au&#x2F;chinas-social-media-obsesses-russian-cats-being-banned-from-competitions-2022-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com.au&#x2F;chinas-social-media-obses...</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsweek.com&#x2F;officials-pour-out-vodka-protest-war-dont-use-russian-brands-1686000" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsweek.com&#x2F;officials-pour-out-vodka-protest-wa...</a>

What do you guys think about making an SMS bot?

This is ridiculous, nevermind the fact that you are assuming you are getting accurate information if you are not in Russia. There is massive disinformation coming from both sides.

Someone needs to automate this

Do you really claim to be against disinformation and then spread it like this?<p>Like, really?<p>What is this thing doing on HN?

It&#x27;s helpful to think of this as akin to a DDOS-like attack on the Russian internal security infrastructure.<p>They&#x27;ve only got so much bandwidth - money, personnel and time - to deal with all of the myriad security issues which keep popping up.<p>The more people we can reach out to, the more &#x27;leads&#x27; the security services will have to investigate, then the less effective they will be at propping up Putin&#x27;s empire of fear.<p>Putin holds power because everyone is so afraid. As soon as the security services stop being effective, and people learn that they don&#x27;t need to be afraid any longer ... then the only thing keeping him in power will begin to evaporate.

I&#x27;m sorry for mentioning this but so far the content on HN about Ukraine has been of very low quality. Today only a &#x27;call Russia&#x27; and a &#x27;Putin is actually smart&#x27; post. I hoped to find many interesting developments, but HN has been awfully quiet on this war (for good reasons probably), but the content that has been posted has been mediocre IMHO.