Time has chosen “The Architects of AI” as “Person of the Year” 2025: a collective recognition that brings together, among others, Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei and Fei-Fei Li. For the magazine, this group embodied the year of acceleration: those who build the models (chatbots and LLMs), those who provide chips and infrastructures (GPUs and data centers), those who guide research and the rules of the game.
Yet there is one point that risks getting lost among all these awards. Artificial intelligence can change markets, science, even the way we work; but without freedom e democracy, its meaning becomes empty. Big words, often repeated in public speeches, which in 2025 come back to bear weight for a very concrete reason: 2025 was the fourth year of the large-scale war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine. The war that American President Donald Trump said he wanted to end in twenty-four hours (he repeated it 53 volte!), but on which, after a year of negotiations, we are still struggling.
And while politics promises shortcuts and quick solutions, the reality on the ground continues to be measured in days, weeks and months in the trenches. If we were to choose the people of the year with a different criterion — not power, not notoriety, but the substance of what keeps a front going — then the names would change. Not party leaders, not high-ranking generals. Three soldiers from different brigades who resisted in their positions for off-scale times, in extreme conditions: they would be the people of the year.
The first is Serhii Tyshchenko. A veterinarian in civilian life, he was working on a dairy farm when he was mobilized in February 2023. He became a combat medic and was transferred to the 30th Mechanized Brigade in July 2024. It was supposed to be a rotation; he didn’t know how long it would last. It lasted 472 days. In a recent reportage published by the New York Times, Serhii recounts the moment in which he understood that he would not return home in a short time: September 16, 2024, after an attack on the positions where some soldiers were killed and without any certainty about the arrival of reinforcements. When, in the autumn of 2025, a possibility to get out finally opened up, the body presented the bill: «Our legs were made of lead. We could barely walk, but we kept moving forward without stopping.” In early December 2025, Tyshchenko was awarded the title Hero of Ukraine for those long months of service in the Bakhmut district.
The other two are Denys “Bars” e Dmytro “K2”, young infantrymen of the 93rd “Kholodnyi Yar” Brigade. In December 2025 they returned from a position in the Kostiantynivka area, where they held the defense for one hundred and thirty days without leaving. Their parole they have the simplicity of those who don’t need rhetoric: they worked “very hard”, digging and building a shelter when a house where they were sheltering was hit by a drone, they adapted, they hid, they continued. The food arrived via drone. And when the time came for the evacuation, they were taken away on a quad bike, together with a twenty-three-year-old Russian prisoner of war, originally from Volgograd: he had surrendered during a fight, but there was no way to evacuate him and he spent more than two months with the Ukrainian military in the positions.
In times like these, it is easy to get caught up in big concepts, in the declarations of great men. But freedom is often not defended in buildings, it is defended in the daily work and in the sacrifice of ordinary people who do much more than a press conference can tell.
This is why, beyond the covers and the awards, one fact remains: for four years there has been a front that, in fact, is now also European. Four hundred and seventy-two and one hundred and thirty days in the trenches: think about these numbers. Who would be able to remain in a hole in the earth for so long, for what for many in the West has now become an empty slogan? And it is not slogans that hold this front, but people like Tyshchenko, “Bars” and “K2”.
We must be grateful to them – and to those who remained beside them – and do everything possible so that they can return home. To those homes in which many Italians, during the 2020 lockdown, struggled to stay despite having food, water and everything else.
In short: Denys, Dmytro and Serhii. For all of us who care about freedom, democracy and everything that comes with it, they should be the people of the year 2025. Remember these names and spare a thought for all those who, instead of sitting at home with their loved ones around a New Year’s table, are still in the trenches at ten degrees below zero and continue to hold that front.
Related News :