Dan Wootton: Zelenskyy is the real leader. Putin is a child killing coward.

Over the past week, we have seen two very different types of leadership that are probably summed up best by these photographs.

There’s that prissy pussy Putin, who sees himself as a real man but is so terrified of catching the Omicron virus – which is in most cases a minor cold that our 95-year-old Queen has just breezed through – that he sits miles away from even his own generals, who have been tested and gone through a sanitisation tunnel before even being in the dictator’s presence.

From his bunker, the paranoid, Covid hysteric mad man is lashing out at his closest advisers over the lacklustre mission so far?

So what does he do?

He bombs. From his bubble. He bombs civilians. He murders children in cold blood. He breaks international law.

He uses vacuum bombs that suck in oxygen to generate a high temperature explosion that set off a pressure wave rupturing the lungs of its victims.

Putin thinks he’s untouchable, but ordinary Russians risking it all to protest on the streets of 32 cities show that many of his own citizens are aghast.

A bloke who used to try and show his strength by riding topless on horseback and coming face to face with tigers in the wild

is a boxed in coward with a botoxed face who is fast losing the faith of his generals and his people.

He’s already lost the West who thought he’d be the man to modernise Russia, but now view him as a despotic war criminal.

Then there’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a 44-year-old former TV comedian and actor – who had fame in Russia and millions in the bank, before surprisingly entering public service in 2019, winning a democratic election with a 73 per cent share of the vote.

He has remained in Kyiv, even though there is a Russian execution order hanging over his head and there are already 400 mercenaries from the Wagner Group operating in the city, just waiting for an opportunity to kill him.

But still he fights on.

Zelenskyy has shown the world true leadership.

And he isn’t going anywhere. He’d rather die alongside his citizens, than jump on an American helicopter out of the capital.

No wonder the translator broadcasting Zelenskyy’s remotely broadcast speech to the EU today choked up.

I appreciate much is lost or misinterpreted in the fog of war.

And there is, as you would expect in war, propaganda coming from both sides.

But we know Putin has launched an illegal invasion that has killed many Ukrainian citizens.

And we know the Russian onslaught is slowly strangling Kyiv, where Zelenskyy remains.

His survival is critical for the future of the world because Zelenskyy is the real leader. Putin is a child killing coward.