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Incidental quibble that if anything supports your main point: Haiti isn't just poor because of bad institutions. It's just a standard-issue West African country but it's in the Americas. The demographic base of the country is West African, the economy is West African, society is pretty West African with bizarre superstitions, political dysfunction, coups and gangs of comically vicious criminals with very silly names (remember the cannibal named Barbecue who was strongest man in the country?). Brazil can't fix West Africans, it has a significant amount of West Africa syndrome as well and associated dysfunction. So if they tried occupying Haiti it would ultimately be pointless. The US occupied Haiti and built infrastructure, ran the place properly in the 1920s when colonialism was fashionable. It doesn't work. Haiti is West African.
Ukraine has real proven potential, it's a fairly well-developed region with industry. They make tanks. They made that gigantic Antonov plane for moving the Soviet Space Shuttle around. They exported military equipment, including an aircraft carrier to China. I saw an anecdote of Ukrainian kids coming to a French school and were bemused by how the French were years behind in terms of maths. They fight like Europeans. They are Europeans.
But Ukrainian governance has been truly terrible, the country has been trapped in this ongoing, spiralling crisis of weakness and foreign influence. The whole sordid affair with Hunter Biden being on the board of a Ukrainian gas firm is indicative of serious problems and excessive US influence. There are ultranationalists running around who really want to get stuck into Russia. There are a bunch of Russians who wanted to get back into Russia. There was the entire USAID/NED/Soros/deep state goon squad taking great interest in the country, their corrosive effect in a poor country is immense particularly when there's lots of highly exploitable history to draw upon. In terms of 'splitting Russia and Europe' - mission accomplished! But as usual there's a lot of blowback and complications that make the whole thing into a net-negative for everything.
In what normal country does a comedian who played the piano with his penis become national leader because he pretended to be an honest politician on television? It's a broken country that really needed someone vaguely authoritarian to crack down on the worst of the corruption and implement sane foreign policy. Alas the US would've probably found ways to suppress a Ukrainian Lukashenko.
Haiti's problem is human capital, in that it has none to speak of.
Ukraine's problem is its a poorly partitioned state. You have ethnic and cultural Russians in the east and south and the ultranationalist Ukrainians to the west and central, then some other lesser groups like random Hungarian communities or Romanian in the west as well. It's torn between two groups pushing in polar opposite directions. It's not Russian enough to fully join Russia's orbit, and not Ukrainian enough to join the west (though arguably Ukrainians aren't western enough to join the west) not in it's entirety at least. Solution would be to just give the Russia speaking parts in the south and east, from Odessa to Kharkiv to Russia. Then integrate what is left with Europe.
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Haiti's problems aren't solely attributable to its demographic base- Jamaica, the Bahamas, Dominican Republic, etc are black Caribbean societies doing much, much better.
You mean Yanukovich? Yeah, about that...
The Dominican Republic is significantly whiter than Haiti, as is Jamaica. Even the Bahamas is only 90% black and relies heavily on tax fiddles for its economy. Wikipedia notes also that white and brown men ran Jamaica:
Yanukyovich is a good example of a suppressed politician IMO.
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