As in the title of the thread. Do Putin and Zelenskyy have the same given name?
Wikipedia says they’re the same:
It seems like they do, though maybe in the sense that Michael (English), Miguel (Spanish), Michel (French), and Mikhail (Russian) all come from the same root name.
How is Vladimir soelled with Cyrillic letters? The same way?
Vladimir = Владимир. Close, but not identical. Very probably from the same root source.
Apparently not: Владимир and Володимир. The i sounds are identical though.
The first time I saw the name Volodymry (before I knew who he was), I thought someone was combining Vladimir and Voldemort. I know, I know, it doesn’t really work, but it’s what my brain saw when I scanned the line.
Not what? It is the same name (and both can be applied to the same guy), but Russian and Ukrainian are not pronounced (or spelled) exactly the same way. The modern Russian spelling is influenced by Old Church Slavonic.
There goes my “Je suis Volodymyr” idea.
. . . that root name being the Hebrew name מִיכָאֵל (mi-ca-el), literally meaning “Who is like El?”
Speaking as a “Michael” myself, that’s the first (and one of the very few) bits of Hebrew which I learned. 
That. I thought that’s what @BigT was asking two posts above.
You are correct. I could tell that it was a name with the same origin. What I wondered is if it was spelled the same in the two languages, and only used different transliteration systems in the Latin alphabet for the two languages. The extra vowel between the V and L intrigued me.
I also had a similar idea to @lobotomyboy63, and was hoping they were spelled differently in their native languages.
My next question is whether or not Ukrainian would spell Putin’s name the Ukranian way, or the Russian way. And vice versa with Zelenskyy and Russians.
For years, especially during the Chernobyl crisis, I would read about the city of Kiev, which I always pronounced “kee-yev”. Since the current situation has dominated the news, I’ve heard English speakers call it both “kee-yev” and “keev”, the latter pronunciation becoming more common as the days go by, and the spelling has varied with Kyiv being a strong preference. What is driving this change? Has it always been Kyiv and “keev”, and not enough English speakers knew better, or has the older way been standard for English speakers (as in, we don’t call the capital of France “Paree”) and the current switch is a new thing driven by a desire to do it closer to how it’s done over there, more out of understandable sympathy for their plight than any solid grammatical need? (Will I be shunned if I say it wrong?)
As I understand it, the Kiev transliteration and pronunciation are Russian in origin. The Kyiv version is Ukrainian, and was mandated by Ukrainian law as of 1995. Which one was used, by whom, has been more and more political, and has obvious ramifications now.
Russian state media uses the spelling “Vladimir Zelensky” when referring to the Ukrainian president in English, and “Владимир Зеленский” when referring to him in Russian. (See for example this English article from TASS and this Russian article.) It’s not clear to me whether this is because they routinely translate all names from certain languages into Russian (the same way that English does with royal names), or because Zelensky is in fact a native Russian speaker and may actually use the Russian version of his name when speaking Russian, or because Russian media wants to downplay or deny the fact that Ukrainian is a separate language. I suspect it’s one or both of the first two, since I also see the spelling “Владимир Зеленский” in more neutral sources, such as the Russian Wikipedia.
For what it’s worth, the Ukrainian Wikipedia lists Vladimir Putin’s name as Володимир Путін, using the Ukrainian spelling, so it would seem that in both Russian and Ukrainian it’s standard to translate, rather than to transcribe or transliterate, names from one language to the other. This practice probably holds only for those two languages, though (or maybe other closely related ones, like Belarusian); in both languages “Joseph Biden” gets transliterated as Джозеф rather than translated as Иосиф, Йосип, etc.
Isn’t it essentially the same thing as “Michael” (English) and “Michiel” (Dutch)? Same name, just a slightly different spelling/pronunciation because they’re in separate, but closely related languages?
Yes, that is what I meant. Just like how you might notice some people spell their name Alexander (or Alexandre), while others spell it Oleksandr, with analogous variations in Cyrillic. Princess Olga the Beautiful herself could have been known as Helga, Voliga, Volha, etc.; I wonder what she called herself?
All very interesting. Thanks to everyone who comented on my question.