The US magazine Timehe chose as person of the year the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky (awarded together with the «spirit of Ukraine»). The editor of the magazine, Edward Felsenthal, commented on the choice by saying that «one can look at what is happening in Ukraine with a sense of hope or a sense of fear (and the story, of course, is not yet fully written), but in in any case it must be said that Zelensky has galvanized the world in a way that hasn’t been seen for decades».
The Person of the Year award – which until 1999 was called Man of the Year, but at a certain point was seen as reductive, as well as discriminatory – is awarded every year by the US weekly Time to a person, a group, an idea or an object that «for better or for worse influenced the events of that year the most». It is not an acknowledgment of a job done but only of the relevance that character had during the year. In 2016, for example, the president of the United States Donald Trump was chosen, the year before among the finalists there was also Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the head of the Islamic State, who arrived behind the German chancellor Angela Merkel. Last year it was awarded to SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, now also the owner of Twitter.