2022 PERSON OF THE YEAR VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY
The call from the President’s office came on a Saturday evening: Be ready to go the next day, an aide said, and pack a toothbrush. There were no details about the destination or how we would get there, but it wasn’t difficult to guess. Only two days earlier, on the 260th day of the invasion of Ukraine, the Russians had retreated from the city of Kherson. It was the only regional capital they had managed to seize since the start of the all-out war in February, and the Kremlin had promised it would forever be a part of Russia. Now Kherson was free, and Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to get there as soon as possible.
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. There would be no way to ensure his safety on the central square, where crowds had gathered to celebrate the city’s liberation, within range of Russian artillery.
“My security was 100% against it,” the President told me during the trip. “They took it hard. They can’t control practically anything in a region that has just been de-occupied. So it’s a big risk, and, on my part, a bit reckless.”
Then why do it? The Russian goal at the start of the invasion had been to kill or capture Zelensky and decapitate his government. Why give them a chance to strike? The obvious reason had to do with the information war, which had become Zelensky’s specialty. By rolling into the city that Vladimir Putin still claimed as his own, the leader of Ukraine would blow a hole through the stories of conquest and imperial glory that Russian propagandists had been using for months to justify the war. Zelensky’s visit would deepen the embarrassment of the Russian retreat and strengthen the Ukrainian will to carry on through the winter.
But that was not the reason he gave for the trip. “It’s the people,” he told me in a two-hour interview as his private train rolled through the country. “Nine months they’ve been under occupation, without light, without anything. Yes, they’ve had two days of euphoria over their return to Ukraine. But those two days are over.” Soon the long road to recovery would come into view, and many of his citizens would want a return to normality, much faster than the state can deliver it. “They are going to fall into a depression now, and it will be very hard,” Zelensky explained. “As I see it, it’s my duty to go there and show them that Ukraine has returned, that it supports them. Maybe it will give them enough of a boost to last a few more days. But I’m not sure. I don’t lull myself with such illusions.”
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. Even the central bazaar was in darkness, though the vendors inside were still selling fresh fruit and cheese, pickles, and pork belly by the glow of electric lanterns. When we passed them, lugging our bulletproof vests and helmets, we made sure to grab some food for the road. “Bring snacks,” one of Zelensky’s aides had warned in a text message. “These trips tend to be very disorganized.”
You wouldn’t know it from the black van that arrived to pick us up, as agreed, at 7:30 p.m. on the dot, and brought us through the checkpoints that surround the government district. The area had become familiar to me since the start of the invasion. For nearly nine months, Zelensky’s team had allowed me to spend much of my time here, working inside the presidential compound and reporting on the ways they have experienced the war and how it has transformed them—and him. The blackouts gave the place a haunted look. Soldiers peered out of pillboxes hidden among the trees, and flashlight beams flickered in the windows of Zelensky’s office on the fourth floor. “Do you have documents on you?” asked one of the guards. “Good, then we’ll know how to mark your grave if you fall behind the convoy.” The joke made his comrades double over with laughter.
That night, the presidential train took about nine hours to travel the length of Ukraine from north to south. Most of the compartments were taken up by the security men, who rested their assault rifles on the luggage racks, kicked up their feet, and watched movies on their phones. They had never seen reporters on this train before, and their only request was that we not take any photos of Zelensky’s private carriage. “If the Russians find it, that’s a bull’s-eye,” one of them explained.
Since the start of the invasion, air traffic over Ukraine has been limited to fighter jets, drones, bombers, and cruise missiles. The train has become the President’s primary means of long-distance travel. From the outside, his carriage is indistinguishable from a regular passenger car. Inside, my expectations of a high-tech command center on wheels, or at least a well-stocked bar, did not pan out. There was no internet on board, and the amenities were modest. A first-class ticket on Amtrak would offer more space to stretch out.
But Zelensky says he enjoys the train. It gives him time to read, and the experience reminds him of his childhood. When he was growing up, his father worked as a systems manager in the copper mines of Mongolia, and the trips to visit him would take eight days on the railroad from their hometown of Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine, passing all the way through Russia and Siberia. He remembers the journeys fondly—the vast expanses of the Soviet empire rolling by, the glasses of tea served in metal cup holders embossed with the hammer and sickle. It is among the many ironies of his predicament that Zelensky was raised in the empire whose revival he is now fighting to stop.
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. “They revolt me.” Memories of his youth are now colored by the atrocities that Russian forces committed this year in service of Moscow’s imperial ambitions.
In April, less than two months into the invasion, Zelensky told me he had aged and changed “from all this wisdom that I never wanted.” Now, half a year later, the transformation was starker. Aides who once saw him as a lightweight now praise his toughness. Slights that might once have upset him now elicit no more than a shrug. Some of his allies miss the old Zelensky, the practical joker with the boyish smile. But they realize he needs to be different now, much harder and deaf to distractions, or else his country might not survive.
Early in the morning, the train came to a stop in an industrial lot in the region of Mykolaiv, where a convoy of vans and SUVs was waiting to drive us the rest of the way to Kherson. The devastation of the war soon appeared on both sides of the highway: bus stops pocked with shrapnel gashes, twisted shells of bombed-out buildings, a family restaurant in the shape of a castle that looked as if it had been strafed with a chain gun. The damage around Mykolaiv was worse than in most of the country, because it was here that the Ukrainians managed to stop the Russian advance from the south in March.
A dozen or so governors, ministers, and generals were waiting on Kherson’s central square when we arrived. They posed and took selfies in front of the graffiti scrawled on the facade of the regional parliament: Glory to the Armed Forces of Ukraine! Glory to the heroes! One of Zelensky’s aides, Dasha Zarivna, grew up in Kherson, and she looked close to tears as she gazed at the Ukrainian flags flying over the square. “I was scared I’d never see this place again,” she told me. “And here we are.”
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.
At the edge of the square, the soldiers had installed a Starlink Internet terminal, plugging its satellite antenna into a diesel generator. The President took out his phone and asked for the wi-fi password. Most of the people around him were armed with assault rifles, but this was his weapon, a late-model iPhone that Zelensky has used to wage the biggest land war of the information age. His skill at addressing the world through that phone—in his nightly speeches on social media, in his endless calls with foreign leaders and supporters—has been as critical as the number of tanks in his army.
Zelensky has dialed into the World Economic Forum in Davos and the NATO summit in Madrid. He has granted interviews to talk-show hosts and journalists and held live chats with students at Stanford, Harvard, and Yale. He has leveraged the fame of entertainment superstars to amplify his calls for international support. Jessica Chastain and Ben Stiller visited his fortified compound. Liev Schreiber agreed to become an ambassador for Ukraine’s official fundraising platform. Sean Penn brought an Oscar statuette to Kyiv and left it with Zelensky. Once, the President allowed a team of technicians to create a 3D hologram of his likeness, which was later projected at conferences around Europe. “Our principle is simple,” says Andriy Yermak, the President’s chief of staff. “If we fall out of focus, we are in danger.” The attention of the world serves as a shield.
The effect has been a kind of virtual omnipresence that has at times grown tedious for some of Zelensky’s own citizens. “We’re always looking for new formats,” says Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the presidential adviser who oversees the TV marathon beaming Zelensky’s message into Ukrainian homes. “But sooner or later people get tired of the flood of news.” And they have started tuning out.
The liberation of Kherson gave the nation a rare chance to celebrate. A crowd had gathered in the center of the square, and someone shouted, “Glory to Ukraine!” The response was a chorus, mostly of women’s voices: “Glory to the heroes!” To the frustration of his security, Zelensky went over to greet them, and the throng surged forward as he approached. Reporters rushed up from behind, locking the President in a crush that his guards could not control. One soldier, his back to the President, had terror in his eyes as he scanned the faces in the crowd for threats. Zelensky smiled and waved. “How are you?” he said. “You alright?”
