KIEV, Ukraine — A Georgian court on Friday sentenced former President Mikheil Saakashvili to three years in prison for abusing his pardon powers while serving as president. Mr. Saakashvili, who is now in Ukraine, was sentenced in absentia.

Mr. Saakashvili’s legal woes have been piling up in both his adopted country, Ukraine, and his homeland, Georgia, but the ruling is the first time he has been sentenced to prison.

In a Facebook post on Friday, he called the ruling, and the flurry of cases against him more broadly, a response to his efforts to fight corruption and “oligarchs” in both countries.

A gregarious populist and an avowed enemy of Russian influence in former Soviet states, Mr. Saakashvili has cast himself as a fighter for good government and pluralistic democracy, and he has said that the criminal cases against him are pushback from an entrenched, corrupt elite. Detractors call him a showboating has-been.