TIME's 2022 Person of the Year: Volodymyr Zelensky and the spirit of Ukraine. Zelensky’s success as a wartime leader has relied on the fact that courage is contagious, writes Simon Shuster. It spread through Ukraine’s political leadership in the first days of the invasion, as everyone realized the President had stuck around. His professional instincts derived from a lifetime as an actor on the stage meant he knew how to read a crowd and react to its moods and expectations. Now his audience was the world. He was determined not to let them down. Courage came to define his fellow Ukranians, too. Instead of running for their lives, many Ukrainians grabbed whatever weapons they could find and ran to defend their towns and cities against an invading force armed with tanks and attack helicopters. Read more at the link in our bio. Illustration by Neil Jamieson for TIME Source Images: Getty Images (12); Ivanchuk: Lena Mucha—The New York Times/Redux; Kondratova: Kristina Pashkina—UNICEF; Kutkov: Courtesy Oleg Kutkov; Nott: Annabel Moeller—David Nott Foundation; Payevskaya: Evgeniy Maloletka—AP