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There was not much of a pie to divide at the start. All countries started being very poor but some countries received new investments and others not.
Specifically in Ukraine oligarhs resisted establishing links with the EU exactly because they feared that new investments will make their wealth to become proportionally much smaller (hence, losing power). If Ukraine had joined the EU despite inefficient privatization, it would have been much more developed today.
On the other hand, the countries that remained economically related to Russia, the risk of western investments was too high and they remained poor.
That just isn’t true. The idea it was zero and FDI is what made the difference belies the fact that some of the countries were just relatively poor and some of the richer countries did worse. Maybe it is a miracle but the transitional economies that performed better were those who transitioned better. Maybe “wasn’t a shit show” is predictive of growth better than “got fdi”
Sorry, I have hard time to understand you. English is not my native language and words like “belies” and “wasn't a shit show” are hard to grasp.
I would say that all countries in the Former Soviet Union and some even beyond that were doing equally poorly.
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