Russia’s President Vladimir Putin attends an annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club international conference in Sochi, Russia, October 2, 2025. Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Pool via REUTERS Purchase Licensing Rights , opens new tab

SOCHI, Russia, Oct 2 (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.

“No, I do not feel like that. Alexander I was an emperor. I am a president elected by the people for a certain term,” he said.

After Putin was appointed as acting president by Boris Yeltsin on the last day of 1999, he won the 2000 presidential election and was re-elected in 2004.

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.

Many Western politicians accuse Putin of being an autocrat and a war criminal, something he denies. Political opponents, mostly abroad, say Putin has enslaved Russia in a corrupt dictatorship that will lead to strategic ruin.

His supporters say he has raised Russia up from its knees after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union and enjoys broad popular support.

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