If you speak Russian, call Russia and tell them what is happening in Ukraine
callrussia.org
callrussia.org
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:
"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."
Yeah I can totally see Americans taking up arms against their government after a couple of spam calls like this.
I never relax when someone tries to assure me with the "it's no problem" tactic.
I was once contacted by a person claiming to be from Dell about a technical support request I was supposedly on for a company I no longer worked for. After informing the person I didn't work for the company they were referring to, I was informed it was "no problem", and they continued on whatever they were talking about.
Or maybe they don't even bother asking and just gulag him.
https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2022...
I could see a spambot calling thousands of numbers a day from europe with a recording versus an actual person. We laugh about the car warranty scam calls we get everyday, but we're all aware of the messaging.
The point is to:
* create noise in the telephone logbook to annoy the FSB.
* create distrust toward the FSB. This would be the result of people getting arrested for receiving phone calls from the US.
> You are no better than the FSB itself then.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They have gotten Schroder on their payroll so he would sabotage german and Europe energy.
Now, they have been threatening western Europe with nukes.
Yes, we are clearly at war with Russia.
Maybe it's due to the positioning of Russia as an existential threat? It just reminds me of the whole freedom fries vs french fries thing and the idea that there isn't a separation between geopolitics and domestic politics.
This, at least from an American perspective, seems to be a sentiment that comes and goes, but has only appeared in very few cases in our past. I cannot speak for the French in this case, but in general I think it's worth pointing out because you'd expect military conflicts to be resolved between militaries and their respective states - this social contract being something of the foundational idea to Western politics.
What Russians need to do now is pick sides. Take a stand against Putin, or, leave Russia. Stay home & keep quiet? They Own him. His deeds. His mass murders.
Zero sympathy for evil.
They've had plenty of time to move away. Some have. Some chose to stay. These are the consequences of the choices they made.
Is it North Korea's citizens' fault that they have a dictator? After all, they do have a "democracy" where Kim Jong-un is "elected": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_North_Korea
[0]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russian-police-arrest-1...
There are several ways Putin can exit office, or exit the world. In the best scenario for everyone, the Russian people should make it happen. Thats a thing they get to choose. The kind of future they want. I bet that ordinary Russians dont want to wake up in a nuke wasteland, eg, and no American, European or anyone else wants to either. Because that is madness. But the Kremlin is a wild card now, and credible reports is they simply dont have the kinds of safeguards and mediating forces that most Western nuke powers do. Best if Russians themselves show him the door, before its too late for anyone.
We really cannot over-emphasize the seriousness of the stakes now. For humanity. Russians best step up, show the rest of us what kind of people they are, down in their hearts.
Now or never.
By the same logic Ukrainians can stop resisting and prevent WW3. Is it "Zero sympathy for evil Ukrainians wishing WW3?".
First, there's got to be a lot of calls since a few million Russians live in the USA. Second, everybody is using Skype/WhatsApp anyway so whatever they manage to capture is mostly pure noise ("granny, can you repeat your Skype login letter by letter").
I think it's important to get past the initial barrier against believing what is happening and you can only do that by being sneaky.
Once you realize that someone is trying to convince you of something that goes against your core belief it's very likely you shut that information down but anything that got already past that barrier will slowly take root and grow.
Feels like calls like these are pretty easy to filter out just by looking at the metadata (ie. random incoming call from the west). On the other hand random calls like this definitely fuels the "foreign interference" that the FSB is probably pushing right now, and would make it more trustworthy.
He got away with blowing up four apartment buildings, with plain-as-day evidence showing the bombings were conducted by the FSB. The population didn't care. They didn't care when he went around assassinating people outside the country. Didn't care when he invaded Crimea. Chicken in the pot, car in the driveway.
There wasn't any "anti-war" sentiment until the sanctions started kicking in.
Now that the ruble is worth less than toilet paper and they can't watch Netflix, they're willing to stand up to him?
Welcome to the cost of your country shitting all over the rest of the world for two decades. Hope y'all enjoy being sanctioned into the stone ages.
LMAO, sorry, but you have absolutely no effing clue what you're talking about. Russia and Ukraine are very interconnected, almost everyone has friends and relatives on the other side. Anti war sentiment was there long before 24th of February.
If you're speaking about news coverage in the US, well, that's another story. Even in western EU, there was a lot of commotion since January.
Unless you have a personal connection with the person and managed to find common political ground beforehand, this may actually sway them in the other direction, especially so if the person has any national pride.
So, talk to existing Russian friends, network with Russians more, build rapport. Be subtle and open-minded, rather than robotically delivering fixed agenda.
The opposite of random calling, basically.
There are different ways to discuss political questions and hopefully get a thinking person to adopt your viewpoint. "Educating" them is not one.
How can you know this?
The Russians may not know, or believe, that there is the shelling of cities with mass casualties among civilians. But they certainly know that Russia is somehow militarily involved in Ukraine right now. Even if they only consume the state-run media, they would have heard this from Putin himself. They know that their economy is collapsing; they know that various payment systems have stopped working; they know that imported consumer goods are disappearing from the shelves, and that stores of international brands are closing. Whether whatever is causing this is called a “special military operation” or a "war" is not a matter of knowledge, but a matter of language usage.
Robo-calling and having a recording say "the people are stronger than Putin", or something like that, could have an impact if people hear it often enough.
The best counter is to make the Kremlin have to guess if you're Z is secretly counter-support or actual support for their 'narrative' of what 'Z' stands for.
Even a tiny effect on that much of the population is huge.
Part of Putin's narrative of control is that the west is out to get ordinary Russians and have been since the Berlin Wall came down. Much of what we've done over the last several weeks in response to this crisis is making that fiction a reality in the minds of Russians. This "call random Russians, troll them" idea is part of that same general philosophy that's making it so easy for people to advocate things that would directly lead to WWIII with a rather uncomfortably high probability that we'd see the use of tactical nuclear weapons (a no-fly zone for just one example).
Or even better:
"Privet kamrad. My name John. Zer is a site Utub. Itz no blokt in Rasha. Taip Ukreyn in surch boks end it vil shou yu trus yu didn't no."
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.
That might be less suspicious and would not implicate anyone since it's clearly just a random advertisement (but of course, you can come up for grounds of arresting anyone looking at a Coke-Cola can the wrong way).
We are just about there ourselves. FBI labeling political opposition of domestic terrorist is kicking it off, replete with false flag operations and political prisoners.
This is what should be done. Random people calling on the phone and trying to "tell you what's really happening" is not going to work, especially in a place like Russia. Shortwave radio is perfect for this.
The great thing about Shortwave radio is that radios are cheap, low powered and easy to hide. The infrastructure is already out there and due to the Cold War, Russians are already familiar with it.
Care about the people there. THEN you can tell them that you've been watching the footage showing Russian convoys are being ambushed and bombed in the roads - that the advance has stalled. That you've seen videos of Russian kids surrendering and dead - Russian losses are much higher than the Russian media is claiming. Ask them if they have any friends and family with men fighting and convey your concern for them.
You are trying to convince them of your authenticity and shared values - that is how you influence someone.
Then tell them that the Russian generals have become frustrated and started mass bombing of the cities - killing many thousands of civilians.
The real villain is Putin and his dogs. Wish them well and pray for them. We are in this together with the majority of the Russian people. You guys should hear the Russian moms calling the Ukrainian helpline crying for any information about their conscripted sons.
A random phone call from a U.S. citizen might look suspicious, and I don't imagine Russian police are giving much benefit of the doubt right now.
Think of it like DDOS-ing their internal security apperatus.
Parent commenter pointed out that making a bunch of unsolicited calls to Russians is counter productive. Proclaiming “something must be done!!” Might make you personally feel better, but that’s not a good thing if it only comes at a detriment to others.
Seriously, how do you respond to unsolicited phone calls? This plan is half baked and will only harden the resolve of people who don’t already agree with the western point of view, and get people who do agree arrested.
I take umbrage at the notion I can’t critique a bad idea unless I’m some sort of saint.
What are YOU doing better?
Sometimes action driven by good intent that does not lead to a desired outcome can serve as a precursor to more effective action. While I too think this is probably not a good idea, i do also wonder if it is so meaningless, why does Russian government need to suppress information, news, and discussion among their citizens in the first place?
How many Americans would have responded well to unsolicited calls in 2003 from Iranians saying the Iraq war was misguided?
The condescension was in response to the assertion that not making said calls was equivalent to letting Ukrainians die, which is ridiculous.
I find the symmetrism you represent ridiculous.
How do we know the Earth isn't flat? Maybe flat-earthers are right? How do we know if santa claus exist? Well, we gather data and apply reasoning to that data...
I'm certain you spend a while evaluating and debating those arguments.
I had a Jehovah's witness visit me once, and unlike most people I did talk to her. She made some arguments, I counter-argued that I don't believe things without a proof, she asked me if I believe that air exists, and she followed my confirmation with the statement "but you can't see it" - to which I responded that I actually can see both the air directly (just like you can see foil laminate if you stack it into multiple layers) as well as indirectly through various experiments. She had no response to that, other than handing me a flyer, which I accepted.
Well if Russians in general are similar to you, this strategy may work. If they are similar to me, I'd guess it will not work. It seems only time can tell how effective the strategy will be.
Imagine being a Putin bootlicker and then still getting thrown in prison because of a suspicious phone call. I guess these people really do want to go back to the Soviet Era, eh?
Acting together, we can reach out to hundreds of thousands of individuals. The Russian police cannot arrest all who are contacted, and even if they try, all of that time, money and manpower that they pour into policing is time, money and manpower that is taken away from brutalizing people in Ukraine.
So even if someone is arrested; even if they are imprisoned -- they can be proud to know that they have done something tangible and significant to help save lives.
Calling random people, messing with the russian internet, targeting the russian opposition/journalists escaping the country who just had all their cards turned off because of the visa/masterkard decisions is simply counterproductive.
Do you guys really have zero idea what country Russia is? Russians have been protesting since 2011 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011%E2%80%932013_Russian_prot... ) and been methodically and systematically repressed for over a decade already.
Examples of things you could do: Form a convoy and block access points to Coke, Starbucks, and McDonald's warehouses/convoys in your country as a protest - continue this until they pull out of Russia. This will cause a lot of lost jobs, wages, and lost business for Russia. Rinse and repeat until every western business has left.
Work on ways to move Chinese businesses (as many support Russia) over here or to EU countries, not the business itself but the industry or product that is needed or shipped from Asia, i.e. help find ways to end our dependency on autocratic societies.
They want to support each other then we need to block them, and make it hurt for anybody else who does.
I'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.
Having a clear bias (support for one side) makes it cognitively even worse.
So I have two choices:
1. Risking telling "noble" lies because in the grand scheme of things Russia (bad actor) has invaded Ukraine (good actor) so even if I'm wrong in some things my intentions are good.
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.
I believe the vast majority of Russians and Ukrainians have good intentions and want peace.
But borrowing from the proverb "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" one has to have a way of self-correcting i.e. hearing the other side.
So call Russians and tell them your side of the story but don't pretend to know "better".
The amount of footage is overwhelming. Just watch as much as you can from both sides and try to draw your own conclusions. The Russian side has a stale message, it blocks real footage and only works by abundant repetition. They downplay the whole situation to their own peoples claiming the other side is using actors and staging footage. Here is where you can use your own judgement.
Consider interacting with them by replying with links to the videos.
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.
Ukraine is a democracy.
HUGE difference.
The vast majority of the death in Iraq occurred from sectarian violence fomented by Iran and later Sunni extremists, to undermine the prospect of having an American ally in the region.
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's of them are real and fact-checked.
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.
My rational is this: it is just impossible to convert the entire Russian population to be peace-loving, let's just face it, it won'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.
The world will be watching the memorial as well, one of it will wake up, the Russians population or the world.
You know, as an Asian myself, I watched all the shit unfolded on Asian people because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I know what vigilante mobs can lead to. Russians who hated the war should suffer none of it.
However, it is important to notice the fact that most Russian supports the ongoing invasion effort (see 1). That means the "ordinary" people supports what Putin has done and they're looking for more.
You may now think "hey but that's all government propaganda". Well, an "ordinary" Russian who's not against the invasion might help or even join the invasion effort. Propaganda or not, the effect is real.
It's not about shaming, it's about providing the critical information needed before someone picked a side and locked themselves at that side.
If people ended up ashamed by this, then hey, their nation did this, maybe they Should feel ashamed.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/08/russia-publi...
Russia isn't North Korea. Yes there has been a tightening lately and all easily accessible media has been propaganda for a long time. But that doesn't mean any Russian can't - with some effort - consume a wide selection of news. And that's their damn responsibility to do so. For example, if you are a soldier asked to go fight in a country, it'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?
We need to stop giving a pass to russians because they have an authoritarian leadership and strict media control. It's very easy to say this from an armchair in a liberal democracy but I'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.
And the same applies to anyone else in an armchair whose armchair is in room temperature because of russian oil or gas.
That's not the only factor, but here in the US it's certainly a big part of the appeal of misleading news sources.
Back in 2003, Americans had a responsibility to protest the Bush regime. And hundreds of thousands of us did, but it didn't do a damn bit of good. We still have the blood of over one million Iraqis on our hands.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is illegal and unjustified, but what moral grounds do Americans have to say anything about it?
Years after he left the scene gitmo is still open and drone strikes still happen.
GWB is gone but his policies endure. Turns out US leadership likes it that way.
Or throughout human history? We aren’t condemning Russians for atrocities even 50 years back we are talking the past 2 weeks or possibly the past 8 years.
The same moral grounds as when we condemned and protested the US's invasion of Iraq? Yes, we were a minority. The majority was hopped up on state propaganda about WMDs and 911 etc. Basically the same as Russia's "denazification" message or whatever it is today, only the US establishment is much better at it.
I'm sure many of the people who supported attacking Iraq are condemning Russia's war on Ukraine right now, but I'd rather support their current positive stance rather than take them to task over past views and seeming nationalist hypocrisy.
> what moral grounds do Americans have to say anything about it?
Interesting question, but even if every American shuts up billions of us can still speak up.
That's how I see request to Russians to stop Putin.
Also hey Russians, we rob all you money in online services and stop those services to work for you. Stop this train!
I see so many variations on that argument, but they all commit that fallacy.
If you look at Russian groups on Facebook - they are ALL talking about the war. ...very passionately.
Russians with western contacts are overwhelmingly against the war. Russians physically in Russia try to be silent online for fear of arrest but they too talk to one another about this clusterF of an invasion.
I’ve seen a few comments about how outrageous it is that people in places like India and Africa are not up in arms about this conflict (I’m just taking their word for it). Not so strange though if you consider their proximity and compare that (lack of) reaction to how few Westerns care about conflicts like the one in Yemen.
There always will be some issues in the society, but what is happening in Ukraine is giving people WW2 vibes and Poles can relate.
It is a matter of time until Russia will crumble though.
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.
You are supposed to relay stories about bombed hospitals and shelled houses that you've either picked up from the media a day ago, or just from the web site's caption text. Are you ready to answer the question "what were you doing in the last 8 years"? Are you ready to even understand it? What about Alley of Angels, are you ready to talk about it?
I would expect there would be some "weaponized" 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.
Consider telling your counterparty that Russia prevents civilians from getting out from besieged cities, and they respond "I've just saw on the TV that Ukrainian far-right batallions are not letting their civilians out to use them as human shield". How are you going to reason from that point? I'm honestly interested because I don't know whose truth is there.
Donno if it helps tho. Saw a tweet about it and lots of people were saying they were sending texts and getting replies.
And now there is no way for me to even go abroad but still send money back home.
1. Protest against Putin and go to prison, in the hope that if Putin is gone the west will drop all sanctions (not very likely).
2. Keep head down.
3. Support the government.
Given that the rest of the world is trying as hard as possible to fuck Russia and random ordinary Russians in every way, I suspect a lot of them will conclude it's us vs them and pick (3). Really a bad set of strategies, in my view. It would be ironic and sad if WW3 was triggered by virtue signalling.
So self-censor certain keywords... as you normally would on the internet.
I've always wondered how good nation states are at converting the speech to text. In my experience working with stuff like Twilio it can be a challenge to do it at scale when trying to identify individual speakers then generating a screenplay like output.
I called a lot of my friends in Russia and they are mostly aware of what'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.
How does it impact Ukrainians if a cat competition bans the breed “Russian Blue”[1]?
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.
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.
You have to obtain political power which is mostly done by organizing other like minded people and/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.
There’s no short cut.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/chinas-social-media-obses... [2] https://www.newsweek.com/officials-pour-out-vodka-protest-wa...
Like, really?
What is this thing doing on HN?
They've only got so much bandwidth - money, personnel and time - to deal with all of the myriad security issues which keep popping up.
The more people we can reach out to, the more 'leads' the security services will have to investigate, then the less effective they will be at propping up Putin's empire of fear.
Putin holds power because everyone is so afraid. As soon as the security services stop being effective, and people learn that they don't need to be afraid any longer ... then the only thing keeping him in power will begin to evaporate.