SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) -Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that he was not a tsar, saying he had been elected by the Russian people to serve a certain term in office. Putin, a former KGB officer who rose to power in 1999, was asked by a moderator at a conference in southern Russia if he felt like Russia’s Tsar Alexander I, who negotiated the Congress of Vienna after the French Revolutionary Wars. I am a president elected by the people for a certain term,” he said. In 2008, his protege Dmitry Medvedev was elected president and Putin served as prime minister before returning to the Kremlin in the 2012 presidential election and again in 2018 and 2024. Political opponents, mostly abroad, say Putin has enslaved Russia in a corrupt dictatorship that will lead to strategic ruin.