A court in Moscow has sentenced Alexey Soldatov, former Russian Deputy Minister of Communications and one of the founders of Runet, to two years in a general-regime penal colony. Ekaterina Chuparnova, Soldatov’s lawyer, informed Meduza on July 22 that Soldatov had been convicted of abuse of power by Moscow’s Savelovsky District Court. Additionally, Soldatov’s business partner, Yevgeny Antipov, was sentenced to one and a half years in a penal colony for similar offences. In the 1990s, Soldatov played a crucial role in establishing Relcom, the first scientific network in the Soviet Union and Rus…