One leader is a former actor who became the president of his country in 2019. The other person, a former spy, is the leader of a neighboring country that spans Europe and Asia, and he has been in power since 1999, serving as prime minister in 1999 and from 2008 to 2012 and as president from 1999 to 2008 and since 2012.The former actor is Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of a democratic Ukraine, a former Soviet republic in the Russia-dominated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which crumbled in December 1991. Vladimir Putin is the other leader, the current President of the post-USSR Russian Federation, which experts say is now an autocratic government.Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, Feb. 24, 2022, Zelenskyy has not escaped Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, even if there was an offer from the American government to evacuate him and his family to safety. An American who has knowledge about the evacuation plan quoted Zelenskyy as saying that “the fight is here,” and what he wants is “not a ride” but ammunition against Russian tanks.Zelenskyy spoke to his fellow embattled Ukrainians via smartphone two days later, Feb. 26, the day when Russian troops stormed toward Kyiv where fierce fighting in streets broke out.The President encouraged his fellow Ukrainians to “stand firm” against the invaders.The Russian military, experts say, miscalculated Ukraine’s resistance, and the fierce battles in different parts of the Eastern European country could drag on for days, if not weeks.Though Russia’s armed forces are stronger than Ukraine’s, they have their losses, too–casualties and destruction of military hardware.Invasion of a sovereign country, which violates international law, can only be launched by a leader with imperialistic ambitions. Putin certainly has this kind of attitude. He had ordered the invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014 and Georgia, also a former Soviet republic, in 2008.In all the bloodshed happening in Ukraine right now, where is President Putin? He is certainly staying in the safety of the Kremlin, far from the frontlines.European imperialist leaders of old like Napoleon Bonaparte led their armies in the battlefields.Putin signed the document recognizing independence of the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in southeastern Ukraine last Feb. 21 and launched the invasion which he called a “special military operation” three days later. He did all these in the safety of the Kremlin, a fortified complex in Moscow.