Episode: 113 — "The War in Ukraine Stopped My Future" · Full Episode #113
Date: 11 March 2022
Language: Libyan Arabic
The guest on Episode 113 spoke under the protection of anonymity. He is a Libyan student of aviation who had been studying in Kharkiv, Ukraine, until the Russian invasion of February 2022. The episode was recorded approximately two weeks after the invasion began, during the period in which the international student population of Ukraine was being evacuated across the country's western borders. He is referred to here as Anonymous (EP 113).
He had been in Kharkiv long enough to complete two and a half years of Ukrainian-language study and to advance into the technical components of his aviation programme. He was, by his own account, weeks rather than years from establishing a foothold inside the Ukrainian aviation sector when the invasion began.
The episode is recorded as recent testimony. The guest describes the morning of 24 February — the first air-raid sirens, the first explosions audible from Kharkiv, the early sense that what was happening was larger than the previous months' diplomatic alarms had suggested. Kharkiv is forty kilometres from the Russian border. The city was among the first to take direct fire.
The guest describes the day in compressed form. There was no time for an organised decision. The decision to leave was the only decision available; the only question was the route.
The route the guest took, with other Libyan and Arab students he was travelling with, eventually delivered them on foot across the Romanian border. The final segment of the journey was a walk of approximately seventeen kilometres. The road was congested. Vehicles were stationary. The walk was, at points, the only way forward.
The guest does not present the walk as heroic. He presents it as the form the exit took. The image of the walk — a young man with a backpack on a winter road, walking toward a border he had not previously had reason to know existed — is the part of his testimony that contains the most weight.
See: The Seventeen Kilometre Walk
The Libyan embassy, the guest reports, was effectively absent during the evacuation. The contrast he draws is not with European embassies but with the informal organisation Libyan students produced for themselves on Telegram channels and WhatsApp groups in the first days of the invasion. The community organised the rides, identified the safer border crossings, coordinated the temporary accommodation on the other side. The embassy, in the guest's account, did not produce a comparable response.
The observation is consistent with a broader pattern Damiri has documented across episodes — that Libyan civil society and Libyan diaspora networks have, repeatedly, substituted for the state during crisis. The guest's specific testimony fits inside that pattern.
The guest had spent two and a half years learning Ukrainian to the standard required for the technical components of his aviation programme. The investment was specific. Ukrainian is not a transferable language in the way that English or French is. The language was an instrument for being inside the Ukrainian aviation sector, and the sector was the destination.
The invasion did not delete the language. It deleted the use case. The two and a half years did not stop existing; they stopped serving the purpose for which they had been undertaken.
After crossing into Romania and moving across Europe, the guest eventually reached Malta. Malta has a small but established Libyan community and a geographical proximity to Libya that has made it a recurring transit point in Libyan migration. The guest is in Malta at the time of recording.
The episode's title and the guest's most direct line are the same: Putin stopped my future. The line is not rhetorical. It is the analytic claim. A specific man, in a specific capital, made a specific decision that ended the trajectory of a specific young person in Kharkiv who had built that trajectory over two and a half years of language learning and technical training. The line resists the impulse to make the war abstract. The future that ended was his future.
"Putin stopped my future." (EP 113)