That’s why Lithuanians called Russia ‘Earth, Wind & Fire’ 180,000 times, drummer Fred White is dead

One phone call can’t change the world, but a few million can. This is the motto of Paulius Senuta. A few weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he and some friends founded the platform “Call Russia”, a telephone initiative against Putin’s propaganda machine.

“In the first days of the war, everyone here in Lithuania was doing something. Our idea was just to call,” Senūta said in an interview with the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. In March, together with IT, marketing and PR experts, he got the project off the ground within five days. His goal: to use information from the West to limit the influence of Russian state propaganda.

The “Call Russia” volunteers use a random number generator to call people in Russia to tell stories and pass on information from a Western perspective. In this way, they hope to inform the population about false information from the Russian regime and dissuade them from continuing to support Putin.

“We are constantly asked where the front actually is, what the losses are in the Russian army, how things are going in Ukraine,” Senūta reports about the lack of information in parts of Russian society. According to him, the people he called were mostly angry at first and many conversations lasted less than five minutes. In between there are sometimes conversations of three hours.

“We have worked out a conversation technique with psychologists,” explains Senūta, but genuine interest on the other end of the line remains necessary. Callers must also be able to listen and tolerate opposing opinions. “Of course I don’t change a stranger’s worldview in an hour. But people are starting to think.”

More than 50,000 Lithuanians tried their luck on the phone and called some 180,000 numbers. Conversations arose in about 90,000 cases.

40 million Russian phone numbers

But the mountain is still high: according to the “Süddeutsche”, the group has taken some 40 million Russian telephone numbers from the Internet. Everyone needs to be contacted. Anyone who speaks Russian can call. “That’s the only thing that can really help us: talking to each other from person to person,” says Senūta.

Most volunteers come from Lithuania and other Baltic countries that were part of the Soviet Union until 1990. But Russian exiles around the world are also taking part in the campaign. For more than 20 years, the image of a hostile West has been building in Russia – an image of the enemy that cannot be deconstructed overnight.

But Senūta admits that most Europeans and Americans know little or nothing about the Russians. He therefore hopes that the project will also work in the other direction and provide more understanding in Western countries. European Union institutions and non-governmental organizations have already expressed an interest in the experiences and insights of the voluntary callers.