Ukraine’s ousted president Viktor Yanukovych was convicted of treason in absentia and sentenced to 13 years in prison by a court in Kyiv on January 24 for his role in Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and fomenting war in the Donbas.

Yanukovych fled the country to Russia during the Euromaidan protests and remains in self-imposed exile.

Amongst the evidence presented in the case was a letter Yanukovych sent to the Kremlin on March 1, 2014 asking for Moscow to intervene militarily in the crisis, a move the Kremlin refused. At the same time Crimea succeeded from Ukraine in a controversial referendum that most of the world has refused to acknowledge. About the same time Russia began to support separatist rebels in Donbas where fighting quickly escalated and has since killed 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers.

“Yanukovych signed and submitted to Russian President Vladimir Putin a request to use the Russian armed forces on the territory of Ukraine, thus assisting Russia in conducting undermining activities against Ukraine,” judge Vladislav Deviatko said in announcing the verdict.

“With his deliberate illegal actions, Yanukovych committed a crime against the foundations of the national sovereignty of Ukraine, namely state treason...With his deliberate actions, Yanukovych committed a crime against peace, namely aiding in the conduct of an aggressive war.”

Yanukovych’s lawyer Vitaliy Serdyuk said he would appeal against the verdict and denounced the trial as “political”.

Yanukovych declined a demand to testify by video, claiming that he was in hospital after sustaining a bad tennis injury. In both Ukraine and Russia suspects cannot be arrested or questioned if they have been hospitalised.

Wrong sentence

Notably Yanukovych was not charged with any of the economic crimes he perpetrated while president. Swedish economist and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Anders Aslund recently wrote that he estimates Yanukovych stole some $40bn while running the country – an amount equivalent to the entire hard currency reserves – and was one of the most egregious kleptocrats that the post-Soviet era has produced. When his Mezhihirya palace was stormed by angry crowds the day after he fled, it was found to be an Aladdin’s Cave of luxury items, including a solid gold loaf of bread (that has since disappeared). Yanukovych was a racketeer that by a combination of good luck and cynical politics ended up as president.

However, he was also elected in 2010 in a race that the west signed off on as “largely fair and free,” narrowing beating opposition leader, former prime minister and head of Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party Yulia Tymoshenko.

That posed a problem for the west as he remained the democratically elected leader of the country and technically his ousting was against the constitution.

As bne IntelliNews wrote in a cover story in January 2014 “Why this man is not fit to be Ukraine's president” just before the peak of the crisis the only legal way of removing Yanukovych was by impeaching him on corruption and related charges.

The reason this option was not used at the time was his Party of Regions were still in a majority in the Rada, making it an unworkable strategy.

It is notable that Yanukovych was convicted on treason charges not corruption charges, but those do not hold up to scrutiny. As the democratically elected leader of a country, a popular uprising that threatens to oust him is a coup d’état, and as president he does have the right to appeal to friendly neighbouring countries to intervene on his behalf, including military intervention.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was in a similar position and also invited Russia in to help him battle rebels and terrorists in the Syrian civil war, giving Russia a legal pretext to be there. The politics of these invitations is a separate matter and Russia’s subsequent support of the separatist rebels and the present of regular army Russian troops in Donbas is equally illegal, if not more, so as it is tantamount to an invasion of sovereign territory.

The ousting of Yanukovych was technically illegal. The EU diplomats on the ground at the time, including Poland’s Donald Tusk and Germany’s then foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, brokered a deal whereby Yanukovych would stay in office until the autumn but then face early elections. The deal was designed to preserve the legitimacy of the president’s office under the constitution and was a workable democratic compromise. However, the crowds on Maidan were impatient and literally stormed Yanukovych’s blothole palace the next day.

Unfortunately the way Yanukovych was deposed was by brute popular force and undermined the constitution. But new elections held shortly afterwards and won by President Petro Poroshenko reset the system and legitimatised the new government.

Yanukovych’s conviction this week is designed to give Ukraine some closure on one of the most painful periods in its modern history and cross a legal “t” in the transmission of power to the new government.