The co-founder of a grassroots campaign to cold call 40 million Russian citizens told Fox News he hopes his effort will change public opinions inside the country about the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine.
"What we try to do through these phone calls is to ask them, how much do they know about what is going on in Ukraine," said Paulius Senuta, co-founder of CallRussia.org. "If we can swing the sentiment of ‘this is a war, people are dying’ … we can stop [the] population [from] basically taking protection of" Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has attempted to silence non-state media. (Yuri Kochetkov/Pool Photo via AP) (Yuri Kochetkov/Pool Photo via AP)
Senuta, along with around 40 other people, set up CallRussia.org over the course of just 120 hours. He says the goal of the campaign is to speak with the millions of Russians who he says support "mad man" Putin.
Friday marked the 16th day since Putin launched a full-scale war against Ukraine.
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While he doesn’t expect to change the Russian "worldview" with a single phone call, Senuta told Fox News that CallRussia.org seeks to connect with Russians on a "basic human level" to help them to understand the violent realities of the war against Ukraine.
CallRussia.org obtained 40 million Russian phone numbers, which Senuta said were all publicly available.
"Russia, a country where everything is banned, like independent media and so forth … the phone number[s] of people [are] public," Senuta said. "So we picked up 40 million phone numbers, totally random phone numbers, which are publicly available."
CallRussia.org website
CallRussia.org, which launched March 8, makes 2,000 calls per hour. Senuta hopes to increase that to tens of thousands per hour.
Senuta, a Lithuanian advertiser, said the group relies on the Russian diaspora across the globe to make the phone calls.
"We started in Lithuania, but we got a great team joining us," he said. "Actually, [there are] a lot of people from the U.S. working on this."
"People from Ireland, from Russia, from [the] Netherlands, from Ukraine," he continued.
Senuta said the Russians on the receiving end of the calls are often angry, but not always.
"The negative [calls are] very aggressive, shouting," Senuta said. "Actually, people don't want to hang down the phone [because] they want to shout at you."
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"In the positive ones, at the moment they understand, they'll shut up, but they will listen," Senuta added. "And you hear they're listening and … that serves the purpose, because we are here to convey the message [of] what is happening in Ukraine."
After a call is over, the recipient is asked to rate their experience. After just a few days, the results appear promising, according to Senuta.
Call Russia Cofounder Paulius Senuta (Fox News Digital)
"After making the call, we invite people to push a button [to rate] if the call went well or [if] the call went bad," he said. "It was actually 50-50, which is not bad."
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