A Russian internet pioneer is handed a 2-year prison sentence by Moscow court

MOSCOW (AP) - One of Russia’s internet pioneers has been sentenced to two years in prison on charges of abuse of office that he has rejected, a verdict that is seen by some as politically driven.

Alexei Soldatov, who served as deputy minister of communications in 2008-2010, was convicted Monday 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.

Moscow’s Savyolovsky District Court also convicted and sentenced Soldatov’s business partner Yevgeny Antipov to 1 1/2 years in the same criminal case.

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 1991 Soviet collapse, Soldatov helped establish other organizations that provided the technical backbone of the Russian internet ever since.

Russian media reports suggested that the charges against Soldatov were rooted in a dispute over an internet domain name and initiated by a senior government official.

Soldatov’s son, Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist who lives abroad and faces criminal charges in Russia linked to his criticism of Russian military actions in Ukraine, denounced the verdict. He argued that the court had no legal right to put his 72-year-old father behind bars because he’s terminally ill.

"The Russian state, vindictive and increasingly violent by nature, decided to take his liberty, a perfect illustration of the way Russia treats the people who helped contribute to the modernization and globalization of the country," Andrei Soldatov and his co-author Irina Borogan wrote in an article published by the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).

"His true crime in the eyes of this vicious regime?” they wrote. “An independent mind, genuine integrity, and a son who lives in exile, while writing about the descent into dictatorship of their homeland."