Volodymyr Zelensky and the spirit of Ukraine is TIME's 2022 Person of the Year
His bodyguards were urging him to wait. The Russians had destroyed the city’s infrastructure, leaving it with no water, power, or heat. Its outskirts were littered with mines. Government buildings were rigged with trip wires. On the highway to Kherson, an explosion had destroyed a bridge, rendering it impassable. As they fled, the Russians were also suspected of leaving behind agents and saboteurs who could try to ambush the presidential convoy, to assassinate Zelensky or take him hostage.
Our rendezvous point for the trip was outside a firehouse, in a part of central Kyiv that was without electricity when the photographer and I arrived the following evening. Russian missiles have damaged or destroyed much of Ukraine’s power grid since the start of October, a concerted effort to make the winter as painful as possible for the civilian population. People out walking their dogs used their phones to light the sidewalks.
For most of his life, he felt nostalgia for the culture and history Ukraine shared with Russia. “There were these amazing Soviet comedies,” Zelensky told me. Among his heroes growing up were filmmakers like Leonid Gaidai, whose works were heavily censored but still charming and often hilarious; one depicted Ivan the Terrible swapping lives with a superintendent at a Soviet apartment building. “These are the classics of my generation, but I’m incapable of watching them now,” the President says.
The first explosion sounded a few minutes later. Everyone froze, looking up at the sky for a shell to come arcing down. Then came another boom, which sounded closer than the first. Someone suggested it was outgoing artillery fire, though this seemed more like an optimistic guess. The Russians had retreated to the left bank of the Dnipro River, about a mile away. The blasts continued to sound, but Zelensky did not seem bothered by them. He declined, as usual, to wear a helmet or bulletproof vest.
There wasn’t much in Zelensky’s biography to predict his willingness to stand and fight. He had never served in the military or shown much interest in its affairs. He had only been President since April 2019. His professional instincts derived from a lifetime as an actor on the stage, a specialist in improv comedy, and a producer in the movie business.A soldier observes the destruction caused by an airstrike in Kharkiv.That experience turned out to have its advantages.
Top row: a wounded soldier at a hospital in the Donbas region in May; inside a bomb shelter beneath a children’s hospital in the first days of the invasion. Bottom row: exhuming mass graves near Izyum in September; Ukrainian soldiers in the Donetsk region in April.The reception was not much grander at the final stop on the agenda, a meeting with the military command in their bomb-proof bunker. It was hidden beneath an old machine works, accessible through a heavy metal door.
A dead body near the entrance of a home in Bucha after intense fighting between Ukrainian and Russian troops.Firefighters clear debris from the Kharkiv Regional Council building which was damaged by an airstrike.The sun was close to setting by the time we got back to the train. Its locomotive idled at a distance from the nearest station. On normal days—if any wartime days can be considered normal—Zelensky and his staff are in a perpetual hurry.
Since taking office, Zelensky has read about Winston Churchill, the historical figure to whom he has most often been compared in recent months. Yet he recoils at the suggestion that they have anything in common. “People say different things about him,” Zelensky notes dryly, making clear that he has no admiration for Churchill’s record as an imperialist.
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