One of Russia's Internet pioneers has been sentenced to two years in prison on a charge of abuse of office that he has rejected. Aleksei Soldatov, who served as deputy minister of communications in 2008-10, was convicted on July 22 on charges related to a deal to transfer a pool of IP addresses to a foreign-based organization. Soldatov and his lawyers rejected the charges as unfounded. In 1990, Soldatov, a nuclear physicist by training, led the Relcom computer network that made the first Soviet connection to the global Internet. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Soldatov helped establish other organizations that provided the technical backbone of the Russian Internet.
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RFE/RL has been declared an "undesirable organization" by the Russian government.
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