Edward Felsenthal, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF @EFELSENTHAL
ON THE COVER OF TIME, THE YEAR ENDED as it began. In January, our cover featured Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned Russian opposition leader and famous dissident, who warned, in a profile by TIME senior correspondent Simon Shuster, against appeasing Vladimir Putin: “Time and again the West falls into Putin’s elementary traps,” Navalny said. “It just takes my breath away.”
This time there was no appeasement, as TIME’s 2022 Person of the Year Volodymyr Zelensky, who appears on the final cover of the year, persuaded the West that freedom was at stake not just in Ukraine but across the world. “If they devour us, the sun in your sky will get dimmer,” Zelensky told Simon during a remarkable interview on a private train journey in November. Simon has spent much of the year reporting from the presidential compound in Kyiv. His time with Zelensky for this project offers an unprecedentedly intimate window into the President’s thinking.
Both covers are the work of artist Neil Jamieson, under the guidance of TIME creative director D.W. Pine. The Person of the Year cover incorporates images of Ukrainians and others who represent the spirit of Ukraine that swept the world as thousands stepped in to help. We tell some of those heroic stories in this issue in a piece by TIME’s Karl Vick and Yasmeen Serhan. The issue also includes images by Ukrainian photographer Maxim Dondyuk, who has worked with TIME, and with Simon, since 2014. He has been covering the war with the eye of a seasoned photojournalist and the heart of a native, and he shares extraordinary photos of Zelensky in settings no journalist has previously seen.
PERSON OF THE YEAR has always been an occasion to step back and think about the year through the lens of the people who helped shape it. For 2022, we broadened the forms of influence we recognize, adding Icon of the Year, Innovators of the Year, and Breakthrough Artist of the Year while continuing our tradition of choosing an Athlete of the Year, Entertainer of the Year, and Heroes of the Year.
The new recognitions have been an opportunity to see leadership from different vantage points. And each offers the exciting challenge of telling that story in a unique way. Sometimes that means constructing an elaborate set with a faux forest and vintage station wagon, as we did for the artist Petra Collins’ shoot of our Entertainer of the Year, Blackpink. It can mean
