As of December 2023, more than 220 Russian soldiers have already taken advantage of the opportunity to surrender to Ukrainian captivity through the hotline of the "I want to live" project. This was reported by the representative of the Prisoner of War Department of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Vitaly Matviyenko, in a conversation with the Financial Times. It is noted that more than 1,000 cases are currently pending.
The hotline was opened in September 2022, as soon as the partial mobilization in Russia was announced. Since then, approximately three Russian soldiers have been captured every week. In total, the hotline received more than 26,000 calls and messages through the chatbot in the Telegram messenger, and the hochuzhit.com website was visited more than 48 million times, of which 46 million were from Russia.
The "I want to live" hotline is staffed by 10 operators from a secret center in Kyiv, including military psychologists and analysts. It is worth noting that one of the significant surges of appeals from Russian soldiers took place in November 2022, when the Armed Forces liberated Kherson from occupation. There was also a spike in applications last spring, in preparation for the March 2023 counteroffensive, with applications almost doubling from December 2022.
