participle or greund

I'd say sitting & drinking are gerunds (used with the preposition "instead of"), the 1st one is the -ing form of the progressive form.

AnonymousHe needs to be fighting instead of sitting in a Russian palace, drinking martinis with President Putin.

sitting - gerund

drinking - present participle as a qualifier

Linguaphile

AnonymousHe needs to be fighting instead of sitting in a Russian palace, drinking martinis with President Putin.

sitting - gerund

drinking - present participle as a qualifier

Drinking is also gerund here

So then no comma is needed?

1. He needs to be X-ing instead of Y-ing = He needs to be X-ing not Y-ing.

To my mind, "instead of" deletes Y-ing, and replaces it with X-ing.

In other words:

2. He is Y-ing. But he should be X-ing.

So I would take both "fighting" and "sitting" as parts of the progressive (i.e. participles).

MrP

I think "needs to be" suggests "progessive" and thus it's participle. "Instead of" is usually followed by a noun which makes an "ing" form of a verb a gerund.

‘To be fighting’ is the continuous (progressive) form of the infinitive, ‘fighting’ is a present participle. I think most of us agree on that.

If I read the sentence correctly as " Instead of sitting in a Russian palace and instead of drinking martinis with President Putin, he needs to be fighting." ‘sitting’ and ‘drinking’ perform the same function and I consider them verba

AnonymousHe needs to be fighting instead of sitting in a Russian palace, drinking martinis with President Putin.

fighting: present participle
sitting: gerund (Of is a preposition, all prepositions take gerunds.)
drinking: present participle (Nothing to do with of, tells us what 'he' should be doing.

Ch