By the sound of it, the international observers of Sunday's Ukrainian parliamentary elections did manage to catch the government of President Viktor F. Yanukovich getting up to some undemocratic naughtiness.

Their report, which the international media yesterday described as scathing, accused Yanukovich's Party of Regions of unfairly benefiting from excessive money from supporters, abuse of government resources to make it look good and heavily biased media coverage in its favour.

Guilty.

The three accused and their lawyer weren’t surprised. They’d anticipated the outcome long before the judge rendered his verdict on Friday in Russia.

They were sentenced to two years in prison by Moscow’s Khamovnichesky District Court.

It all began on February 21 when, in a priests-only section of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior, three members of Pussy Riot, a Russian feminist punk-rock musical collective, staged an impromptu anti-Putin performance which lasted about a minute.

One week after the performance, an edited video piece appeared on Youtube and a week later the police were instructed to arrest the group’s known members.