Volodymyr Zelensky and the Spirit of Ukraine: TIME Person of the Year 2022

Zelenskys success as a wartime leader has relied on the fact that courage is contagious. It spread through Ukraines political leadership in the first days of the invasion, as everyone realized the President had stuck around. If that seems like a natural thing for a leader to do in a crisis, consider historical precedent. Only six months earlier, the President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghania far more experienced leader than Zelenskyfled his capital as Taliban forces approached. In 2014, one of Zelenskys predecessors, Viktor Yanukovych, ran away from Kyiv as protesters closed in on his residence; he still lives in Russia today. Early in the Second World War, the leaders of Albania, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Poland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Yugoslavia, among others, fled the advance of the German Wehrmacht and lived out the war in exile. There wasnt much in Zelenskys biography to predict his willingness to stand and fight. He had never served in the military or shown much interest in its a