In the end, it will be good for the Ukranian. Painful, but good.
We can only hope. Their ‘European choice’ is first to blame. As for five years ago they were largely a manufacturing economy geared around heavy industries like shipbuilding, aircraft, automobile and arms manufacturing.
The problem is they were stuck in the 1970s in terms of regulations and due to extremely low energy prices subsidized by Russia which was the consumer of most the stuff they produced.
With ‘European choice’ they got Byzantine EU regulations and moving from the Russian customs union made their energy regularly priced and on top of that Russia lifted ‘free trade’ status exposing their exports to regular fariffs.
Needless to say that they can’t sell any of their manufactured goods outside the Russian market unless we are talking about highly sensitive dual use or straight military technology they are offering to China, North Korea and Iran just to stay afloat.