As Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues, Ukrainian military officials have set up a hotline for Russian soldiers to call in and surrender. Is it working to end the war?
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, Ukrainian military officials have set up a hotline for Russian soldiers to call in and surrender. Is it working to end the war?.
Today, we talk to the people behind it. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times global affairs correspondent Laura King
More reading:
Lots of Russian soldiers want to surrender. Ukraine makes it easier with a high-tech hotline
A soldier’s tale: Russian serviceman’s scathing memoir depicts a senseless war
Read the L.A. Times’ full Ukraine coverage
Gustavo Arellano: More than a year into an exceptionally bloody war, Ukraine's military is focused on one task: getting Russian soldiers off the battlefield.
The historical way, of course, is via killing and conquering. But Ukrainian leaders are finding out there's a surprisingly easy way to do that that doesn't involve military might.
Hotline Clip: Unified Center for Receiving Applications for Surrender, how may I help you?
Gustavo Arellano: Facing probable death on the front lines, a lot of Russian soldiers want to surrender
Hotline Clip: Hi, hi. Soldier: I was given this phone number. They say you can help me to surrender voluntarily, is that right?
Gustavo Arellano: Now a new Ukrainian hotline makes that easier. Can it turn the tide of the war?
I’m Gustavo Arellano. You’re listening to “The Times: Essential News From the L.A. Times.” It’s Friday, March 24th, 2023. Today: How Ukraine’s surrender hotline works, and what it means for its conflict with Russia.
Here to talk to me about all this is my L.A. Times colleague, global affairs correspondent Laura King. Laura, welcome to “The Times.”
Laura King: Thanks for having me.
Gustavo Arellano: So, Ukraine Surrender Hotline. Is it literally just like it sounds? You call a number, you say, “I surrender,” and that's that?
Laura King: Well, it's a little more complicated than that, but that is the basic concept, yeah. I mean, what they wanted to do was create a relatively simple mechanism for these kinds of surrenders to happen.
Gustavo Arellano: Has this ever even been attempted before? It sounds so brilliant, yet it's also kind of, so, yeah, of course, why wouldn't you have this in the first place, you know?
Laura King: Well, it's the first time that I've ever heard of a project like this used in warfare. I mean, a few things that happened with the Ukraine conflict is there's social media available and technical means that were not available in past wars. And so the Ukrainians all along have been very innovative about using technology, and this is another example of that.
Gustavo Arellano: Yeah, it sounds like 411 here in the United States. Uh, for those of us who have been around this world for a little bit, it was an old-school information system where people literally called 411 and you would be able to ask people for advice and all that.
Laura King: Yeah. It is actually kind of a similar concept. There are a couple of different ways that people can make the initial outreach. They can look at the website associated with this program. They can be directed to a Telegram channel — that is Telegram, the encrypted messaging app — and, uh, talk with the chat bot, uh, just like people do for all kinds of other things. Or they can make a physical phone call to the hotline, which is called “I Want to Live.”
Gustavo Arellano: So what happens then when someone does call this number?
Laura King: Well, they get a fluent Russian speaker, who greets them and asks them, uh, what the purpose of their call is and what it is that they want to do. They have to be the ones to say, “I want to figure out a way to turn myself in. How can I do this without getting myself killed or getting anyone else killed?”
Hotline Clip: Have you been mobilized already? Are you a serviceman? Soldier: Yes, I’m mobilized. They will be sending us to Kherson soon.
Laura King: One of the calls that we listened in on was from a soldier who was already deployed, already with his unit, and he was aware that they were headed toward the battlefront near the southern city of Kherson.
Hotline Clip: Soldier: I’m not sure I understand. When the Ukrainians come, should I just kneel, or what? Or what else? How should I surrender?
Laura King: He was trying to find out how he could make contact once he had reached the front lines.
Hotline Clip: When you get to the front line, just call us right away. Soldier: Understood. I am not alone here, we have a whole group.
Laura King: And so he makes this call to the hotline and he's given instructions to do very particular things.
Hotline Clip: Or you could apply for shelter in Ukraine or in third countries.
Gustavo Arellano: What was the impetus for this hotline? Why set it up in the first place?
Laura King: Well, it's all about getting Russian soldiers off the battlefield. That's the chief motivation for Ukraine to, to do this, to conceive of and carry out this project. So it comes at a time when both sides are getting ready for spring offensives or trying to prepare for them, and it's already been a very bloody conflict, and it's only going to get more so in coming months. So, this is just a mechanism for taking opponents off of the battlefield.
Gustavo Arellano: So are a lot of Russian soldiers calling in then? I mean, how do they even find out about the hotline?
Laura King: Well, they find out about it via Russian-language social media. The Ukrainians have been pretty aggressive about spreading the word wherever they can in forums that Russian soldiers or their families are likely to, to see them. The big portal has been their website, which has attracted many, many millions of visits — more than 13 million when we had a chance to chat with the people from the program — and, um, more than 7 million of those have been from inside Russian territory.
The Ukrainians will not say specifically how many surrenders have actually been brokered through the hotline, because they don't really want to give that information to Russian commanders who are also kind of trying to track this. But they consider an indication of seriousness to be if soldiers engage with the chat bot, which means providing some personal information and contacts, or if they call the hotline itself, the phone hotline. And that accounts for about 10,000 contacts. So it's a substantial number. And whenever anybody calls this hotline, they're going to get an answer.
Gustavo Arellano: Coming up after the break, the Ukrainian operators manning the “I Want to Live” hotline, and the Russian soldiers calling in.
Gustavo Arellano: Laura, so when a Russian soldier calls this hotline, what's the procedure? Who's picking up the phone? What are they being told? What do the Russian soldiers say?
Laura King: Well, the people picking up the phone are active-duty Ukrainian service personnel, and they all have backgrounds in psychology, various degrees of formal training, because obviously these are tricky kinds of conversations. They don't want to be overly and artificially friendly to a battlefield enemy, but they also do want to engage them and draw them in and let them know that this is a legitimate means of doing what they want to do, which is surrender.
Laura King: OK, and can you, uh, tell us your name and your rank?
Vitaly Matvienko: Vitaly Matvienko. spokesman of the “I Want to Live” project and the …
Laura King: So we spoke to, a spokesman, um, Vitaly Matvienko.
Laura King: Again, thank you very much for seeing us and taking the time to talk about this program.
Laura King: I was speaking with Mr. Vitaly Matvienko through a translator.
Laura King: So what can you tell us about, uh, the “I Want to Live” program?
Laura King: This meeting was arranged for us at Ukrainian military headquarters in Kyiv. There was a certain amount of tension in, in the capital. There were air raid alerts sounding, and in fact, there was an air raid alert during our conversation…
… and Vitaly Matvienko Is someone who, like many Ukrainians, was going about his professional life when the war started and then was mobilized to join the army. Um, he's actually an actor in real life, a pretty well-known television and movie actor.
Laura King: Uh, what, what kind of characters did you play in movies?
Vitaly Matvienko: Well, they didn't give me villains, because I have good eyes, kind eyes.
Laura King: And, for about the last year since the start of the invasion, he's been working in the Department of Prisoner Affairs and, uh, working on this hotline for about the last six months.
Gustavo Arellano: What did Matvienko say about how the group came up with the name of the hotline? I mean, “I Want to Live,” that's a name if ever there was one for a surrender hotline.
Laura King: Well, they just wanted to make the point in the simplest way that they could.
Vitaly Matvienko: We were selecting the name for a long time.
Laura King: If a soldier who has been deployed to fight against Ukrainian forces and thinks his chances of survival are not so good, that's the thing that might occur to him: I want to live.
Vitaly Matvienko: Since every genius is simple, the project for those people who want to, to give in, that's why the project is “I Want to Live.”
Gustavo Arellano: And the actual process of surrendering, then, how does that work out?
Laura King: Well, it's, it's a complicated, dangerous endeavor when you're out in a chaotic situation like a battlefront. So what they try to do is give soldiers who want to surrender — Russian soldiers who want to surrender — very specific and very clear protocols for carrying this out.
Vitaly Matvienko: The protocol is very simple. We have an algorithm developed by our experts. When a Russian soldier surrenders, he needs to make some steps.
Laura King: In our conversation, Matvienko told me that the Russian soldiers who call into the hotline, they're told to obtain some kind of a white cloth that they can use as a white flag, to remove the magazines from their guns ...
Vitaly Matvienko: It should be down with the barrel, without bulletproof vest, without his helmet
Laura King: … to approach with their, with their hands raised.
Vitaly Matvienko: If they turn in in a group, that's one of the commanders of the group, the senior ranking officer, just steps up.
Laura King: The highest ranking among them has to identify himself as being responsible for this group.
Vitaly Matvienko:: If this is a tank or BTR [fighting vehicle], so the turret has to face the opposite direction
Laura King: There are, again, specific instructions. If it's a tank that has a turret and a gun, it has to be turned in the opposite direction, away from the forces that they're surrendering to.
Basically what they're trying to do is just set everything up in advance as much as possible to make sure that neither side winds up thinking the other has changed their mind and is trying to kill them, and then a firefight breaks out, that kind of thing. That's exactly what the scenario that they're trying to avoid.
Gustavo Arellano: Did they tell you at all about any training that the operators have to go, because like you said, it's risky, it's high stakes, it's nerve-wracking. I could only imagine.
Laura King: Yeah, the hotline operators are not winging it at all. They have been instructed very clearly about what they should and shouldn't say to these Russian soldiers who want to surrender. So, you know, it’s all a very carefully scripted kind of encounter. But at the same time, they have to have the flexibility to draw someone into a discussion and to, to answer questions that come up and that kind of thing. So, that's why these people have to be selected pretty carefully for their various abilities, with the Russian language and with just kind of an ability to talk with someone who is nervous and maybe very frightened about the prospect of trying to pull this off.
Gustavo Arellano: Wow. What happens then to the Russian soldiers after they surrender?
Laura King: Well, one thing that many of the soldiers ask in advance, the Russian soldiers who want to surrender, they're saying things like, “Is my paperwork going to reflect this? Is it going to be evident if I'm exchanged in a prisoner swap that I surrendered rather than being captured?” And they are reassured that their paperwork is just going to say that they were captured, not that they gave themselves up voluntarily.
Gustavo Arellano: Why are they worried about that?
Laura King: That they or their families in Russia could face repercussions, or some kind of retaliation as a result of having given themselves up to the enemy.
Occasionally, the soldiers involved, um, want to to be part of a prisoner exchange and to go home to Russia and rejoin their families. But some of them want to seek haven in Ukraine or in another third country in Europe, and this would involve a long vetting process, but it is a possibility for them. If the Ukrainians can ascertain that they have not committed crimes or atrocities while deployed in Ukraine, then there is a possibility for them to try to, um, obtain something akin to asylum, either in Ukraine or in another European country.
Gustavo: And are the operators of this hotline worried about Russian spies toying with them, or like exploiting this, like drawing them in? “Oh, yeah, we're going to surrender,” and then just something horrible happening, like a counterattack?
Laura King: Absolutely, that's a big concern. And they just have to be very alert to signs that this might be a probe by Russian intelligence trying to gain information about Ukrainian methods and intentions that could help the Russian side. So it's just kind of a matter of finding their way through these conversations and trying to detect whether there's any ill intent on the part of those who are claiming that they want to surrender.
Gustavo Arellano: After the break, the Hail Mary strategy behind “I Want to Live.”
Gustavo Arellano: Laura, like we talked about earlier, surrendering during a conflict is nothing new. It's been happening since the beginning of time. So what's different about “I Want to Live”?
Laura King: Yeah, this is really a centuries-old phenomenon, isn't it? Where people just decide that for one reason or another they do not want to sacrifice their lives for the cause that they've been put on the battlefield for. So it's really a matter of technology, I think. It’s, it’s really 21st century warfare, in that people can use this, uh, chatbot, an encrypted messaging app, things that were just, you know, even in wars of 10 or 15 years ago, were simply not part of the picture.
Oh, and there's definitely an element of psychological warfare here.
This hotline is really meant to take advantage of the fact that there are many Russian soldiers who have been mobilized who are in this fight and do not want to be there. And Western analysts have said that morale is one of the biggest problems for Russia and for Russian commanders.
This has been a particularly brutal war. Um, there are well-documented instances of commanders using soldiers in a way that, uh, really amounts to suicide missions on their part.
Vitaly Matvienko: Yeah. You have seen movies about zombies, right? They have an order just to advance for the infantry. They just go ahead as zombies, being well aware that they're going to die anyway.
Laura King: They do have some professional soldiers who are well motivated and well trained, but there are many who are conscripts and who are unwilling to take part in this war, and do not see this war as something that they're willing to sacrifice their lives for.
Vitaly Matvienko: In any case, in their minds they need to – it still has to occur: how to save their life.
Laura King: And the Ukrainians are aware. And they're trying to think of ways that they can remove the Russian soldiers from this fight other than by meeting them on the battlefield and killing them.
Gustavo Arellano: So then a big goal of this hotline is to make those Russian soldiers realize or think that they don't mean much to their leaders and hopefully, by telling them that, then they'll be more apt to surrender.
Laura King: Yeah, and the thing is, in this war, Russian soldiers are also able to communicate with their families and to post things on social media. So fewer and fewer people these days from Russia get to the battlefield believing that their commanders are not going to be willing to sacrifice them in kind of senseless ways if they feel that that will advance the Russian cause.
Vitaly Matvienko: In Russia, we know these people are not needed. No one cares about them. That's why “I want to live.” That's why the hotline works for people who understand and realize: for the Russians who have still have some humanity inside of them and they understand that they were just not lucky to be born in Russian Federation, but nevertheless, the, the command just use them as the cannon meat.
Laura King: I mean, very early in the war, there were soldiers who were not even aware that they were being sent to Ukraine and that they were going to be fighting a war when they got there. So these kinds of sentiments on the part of Russian soldiers have been pretty well documented, in intercepted calls, in things that they post on social media. There does seem to be a pretty good independent flow of information about that, not just from the Ukrainian side.
Gustavo Arellano: So I'm curious, what other ways is Ukraine using this hotline? There seems like there could be more potential benefits here too.
Laura King: The soldiers who surrender, it's important to remember that they're a commodity. They are a valuable commodity because they can be traded for Ukrainians who have been taken captive by the Russians. And there have been many, many prisoner swaps involving hundreds, or probably thousands by now, of prisoners. And so getting people who are willing to surrender themselves, uh, they can then be used in these prisoner swaps. And so the Ukrainians are just really keeping their eye on the ball and thinking about how to obtain prisoners like this.
Gustavo Arellano: So, is the surrender hotline helping Ukraine make gains in the war?
Laura King: Well, because we don't know the numbers involved, it's hard to tell the extent to which it's moving the needle, really, in terms of taking people off the battlefield. But what it does do is put the Russians on notice that the Ukrainians are going to be adaptive and be innovative in their methods, and that they are going to use technology as they can and use psychological tactics and use their own familiarity with Russian language and culture to their own advantage as best they can.
Gustavo Arellano: Yeah, and finally, Laura, a key feature of this war is those historically close ties between Ukrainians and Russians. So how has that played out in the “I Want to Live” hotline?
Laura King: Well, one of the calls that we were able to listen in on was a rather poignant story, and it's, it's not such an unusual scenario.
Hotline Clip: Unified Center for Receiving Applications for Surrender, I'm listening. Caller (speaking Ukrainian): Good day, tell me please — we have a situation here, my husband is Russian.
Laura King: It's of a Ukrainian woman who was married to a Russian man who was in Russia at the time, and she was fearful that he was about to be mobilized …
Hotline Clip: On the territory of which country are you located? Caller: Kyiv, Oblast. But the thing is, he is in Moscow.
Laura King: … and wanted to know whether it would be possible for him to surrender, and if he did, whether it would be possible for him to be able to stay with her and their family in Ukraine.
Hotline Clip: Caller: We have two small children. I understand. OK, thank you.
Laura King: It's just an indication that this war has really torn apart some families, and this was her asking rather poignantly whether they could be together again.
Gustavo Arellano: Laura, thank you so much for this conversation.
Laura King: Thanks for having me.
Gustavo Arellano: And that's it for this episode of “The Times: Essential News From the L.A. Times.”
Kasia Broussalian and Helen Li were the jefas on this episode. It was edited by Jazmín Aguilera, and Mike Heflin mixed and mastered it. Our show is produced by Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistants are Roberto Reyes and Nicolas Perez. Our fellow is Helen Li. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our executive producers are Jazmín Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back Monday with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.