I travelled to Ukraine several times just before Maidan. It was a dark place then. Downtown Kiev was lovely, but other towns and cities looked very much like Soviet industrial towns in Northern China. No doubt Chinese cities and towns have surpassed them all since.
People were not friendly, and reserved, but one couldn’t blame them. They suffered from the dark hand of corrupt central government and oligarchs. All the USA did was place itself at the top of that system in an attempt to push out Russian influence.
People have been emigrating at a rate of 300K per year for 30 years. Many more millions left when the war started.
Their infrastructure is completely destroyed. An entire generation of men have been killed. There’s literally nothing left there.
Same can be said for Moscow and Russia.
Moscow looks as modern as any city on the globe, but go outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg and Russia is still pretty much the same as it was in Soviet times.
All the USA did was place itself at the top of that system in an attempt to push out Russian influence.
....so it was the existing Russian influence that made it the craphole it was. No wonder the pro-west Maidan that erupted when
Yanukovich renegged on his promise to go west.
“This network with 15,000 miles (24,000km) of track is Europe’s third largest. It has become a lifeline for the war-torn country. Since Vladimir Putin’s invasion the railway has helped bring civilians to safety. It has transported 4 million people and an estimated 120,000 pets. Eight million have fled abroad and 6.2 million are internally displaced, in the continent’s biggest refugee crisis since 1945.”