Nearly 10,000 Russian soldiers contacted the Ukrainian army’s “I want to live” hotline. This is what the Kyiv Independent wrote, citing the Ukrainian Coordinating Center for the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The operation was launched by Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate in September 2022, and the 24-hour hotline “allows Russians to voluntarily surrender themselves or their units to the Ukrainian military. Russian military personnel are kept in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.”
In addition to the hotline, the newspaper writes, there is also a chatbot and a Russian-language website maintained by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense with information about the program. According to the report, “14 million people have visited the site since its launch.” Most of them are families of soldiers who returned to Russia, although the Russian government blocked the site in mid-October. In December 2022, Defense Ministry Intelligence Directorate representative Andriy Yusov said “the hotline received a total of 1.7 million calls, with more than 100 calls per day.”