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What a silly plan. Consider the reverse situation. You are a US citizen, and your phone randomly rings. On the other line, there is a guy speaking English with

• tpoacher 5y ago
  PS. For anyone not getting the 'I have pen' quote, it's a reference to this internet classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o8XMlL8rqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o8XMlL8rqY :)
  • trainsarebetter 5y ago
    Ha nikolie… sounds a lot like nikola ;)
  • m00dy 5y ago
    I didn't know about it :) thanks
  • pyronik19 5y ago
    "Trust me I'm a fact-checker" is the US equivalent.
  • bmitc 5y ago
    I wonder if there's a correlation to how often "it's no problem" is uttered to how likely it actually is a problem. 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.
• antattack 5y ago
  It might be a good plan if one wanted to create 'noise' for FSB so these random calls overwhelm their surveillance capabilities.
• bombcar 5y ago
  This is a wonderful way to make some poor Russian have to explain to the FSB why he got calls from the United States. Or maybe they don't even bother asking and just gulag him.
  • zelon88 5y ago
    Well then maybe his friends and family left behind will find the motivation to take action against their shadowy oppressors.
    • pydry 5y ago
      • KennyBlanken 5y ago
        Like the country that has been waging an online psy-ops on us for the last decade and a half and literally bribing our elected officials?
        • jafoi 5y ago
        • pydry 5y ago
          Interestingly CIA was kind of blazed the trail there. They even openly bragged about how it got Yeltsin elected. What would you do if you ran a country and the CIA was running a psyops campaign on your citizens? A) Ask them nicely to please stop. B) Do it back C) Do it back and then call for a truce D) Nothing whatsoever From a game theory as well as a moral perspective I think theres one right answer here, but Im curious as to what your answer is.
          • steve76 5y ago
            [dead]
• bastardoperator 5y ago
  The inverse is happening right now, Russian citizens are calling Ukraine searching for family that happened to be a part of the Russian army. https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2022/02/28/ukraine-establishes-hotline-for-concerned-russian-families/ 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.
• krapp 5y ago
  No, think about it. We have all of these free speech advocates who insist that sunlight is the best disinfectant, that only necessary response to misinformation is information, that one simply needs to engage with extremists in rational debate on the facts, etc. Let them loose on the Russian public and the war could be over in a matter of days!
  • mcguire 5y ago
    In case anyone doesn't recognize it, this is sarcasm.
• malka 5y ago
  The point is not to convince them. 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.
  • WinterMount223 5y ago
    Are you okay with getting individuals possibly arrested in the name of a purported common good? You are no better than the FSB itself then.
    • malka 5y ago
      We are at war. > You are no better than the FSB itself then. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      • lofatdairy 5y ago
        To be honest I find the notion of "We" here to be rather dubious. Russia and Ukraine are at war, and while us private citizens of the broader English-speaking world can condemn one side, and support the other, pushing others towards the belief that this is somehow a total war and that every action is justifiable seems patently false.
        • malka 5y ago
          Russia has been pushing far right, and attempt to disrupt politics in my country for years. 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.
          • jl6 5y ago
            Words mean something. We are not at war with Russia.
• auslegung 5y ago
  You’re probably right, but it’s possible that the environment is such in Russia right now that this could be impactful. From what I’ve been reading and seeing, the Russian people are more willing now than ever to protest and question their government. Those who are on the fence may actually be swayed by a random call like this, but only if they are already suspicious of the information the Russian government is showing them.
  • KennyBlanken 5y ago
    Is this a joke? Putin is wildly popular because he 'stands up to the west' and had presided over economic prosperity. 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.
    • utrack 5y ago
      > There wasn't any "anti-war" sentiment until the sanctions started kicking in. 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.
  • throwaway290 5y ago
    There is a major element of shaming and condescension here. The very act of this implies "hey, I know more than you do! what you know is less, and also false. because your government tells you wrong things, but my government tells me the truth! so let me educate you". How do you think you and the rest of the West would come across? 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.
• dmix 5y ago
  If they don't pick up then you can just dial their number repeatedly until they do. Simple.
  • gruez 5y ago
    So we're for harassing random Russian civilians now?
• xdennis 5y ago
  Must Russians don't even know there's a war. Even a bad call could trigger some to look up what's happening.
  • azangru 5y ago
    > Must Russians don't even know there's a war. How can you know this?
    • tada131 5y ago
      It's a big lie
    • mdoms 5y ago
      This is misinformation peddled by Russian sympthisers in the West.
    • quinncom 5y ago
      https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/world/europe/ukraine-russia-families.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/world/europe/ukraine-russ...
      • azangru 5y ago
        Maybe I misunderstood what was meant in the parent comment. 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.
• amelius 5y ago
  I think we should ask some marketing genius on how to approach this one. 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.
  • gremlinsinc 5y ago
    Robo call in Russian and say: Z is For Zelenskyy, if you support Zelenskyy put a big Z on your vehicle. (Russia's trying to create their own Swastika out of Z which is very poor marketing since Zelenskyy's name starts with Z and you can't really google 'Z'... etc... 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.
    • eurasiantiger 5y ago
      Better yet, make them use juuust slightly yellow paint for their Z. I want to see Russian cops start carrying colorimeters to determine guilt, lol.
    • amelius 5y ago
      Good one!
• dangerface 5y ago
  Yea I only believe propaganda on facebook, who even uses phones anymore anyway? Clearly this is a CIA op
• whoisthemachine 5y ago
  To be fair, Russia _does_ do a version of this extensively, with bots on social media. It still only manages to have some (maybe?) effect on ~30-40% of Americans, so your point stands, the tactic has limited effectiveness.
  • mcguire 5y ago
    "Limited effectiveness" Even a tiny effect on that much of the population is huge.
    • whoisthemachine 5y ago
      Indeed! It is one of those things that is difficult to measure, but we know the strategy has some effect, otherwise they wouldn't do it.
• remarkEon 5y ago
  I'm glad this is the top comment because this is indeed an absurd and ridiculous plan. It's pretty amazing how many people in this thread and in MSM are copy/pasting the exact playbook run by Dick Cheney and his gang of liars, and doing a "Ctrl-F" to replace "terrorist" with "Russian". Notice as well that these analyses are not making a claim that Ukraine itself represents some specific national interest to the US and NATO, security or otherwise. The tone is consistently vengeful and demonizing. The difference between 2022 and 2003 is a matter of velocity in terms of how quickly the fervor can spread via our technology, and how difficult it is to pare back the insane calls for escalation. 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).
• ilyich 5y ago
  >Trust me. Look. I have pen 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."