From the outside, before 2014 the only outward manifestation of itself I - and indeed many others - picked up off Eastern Ukraine, was the international success the Shaktar Donetsk football team was enjoying, as consistently being a competitive side in Champions League throughout the years.

From there one could infer that rich people who could splurge on football in fact did exist over there, and given that Shaktar was even better rated than Dinamo Kiev, the previous observation could work as reason to infer that the region as a whole could reasonably be thought as the most affluent within the Ukraine.

Perhaps it's not that I was wrong (Donbas still more dynamic economically than Kiev or Galicia), I just downplayed the importance of certain other issues, and in fact placed oversized importance in economics...Trump and the Brexit referendum were yet to happen in the West, dispel that notion, and show that history indeed was not dead yet