Our Planet Climate and Geopolitics
A man credited with bringing the internet to Russia in the 1990s has been jailed for two years by a Moscow court. Alexei Soldatov, a nuclear physicist who served as deputy minister of communications from 2008-10, was sentenced on charges of abuse of office, which he rejected. The charges were reportedly brought by a government official after a dispute over an internet domain name, according to the Associated Press. Soldatov’s son, Andrei Soldatov, a prominent Russian journalist now living in exile abroad, said his father, 72, was terminally ill and the court therefore had no legal right to pass a custodial sentence. Andrei claimed his father’s “true crime” was “an independent mind, genuine integrity, and a son who lives in exile, while writing about the descent into dictatorship of their homeland”.
