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.”
