[kutakbash]

>starts to eat more money for social subsidies than it produces

>Crimea has been always unprofitable even with its lucrative tourism industry

Not a marker of anything, there are only a few oblasts in Ukraine that are profitable (taxes - government spending), until very recently none of them were in the Western part of the country. This may be not the best way to judge contribution of different parts of the country into the economy. If you give a look at exports structure (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Ukraine_E...), you can clearly see that it is dominated by products of exclusively Eastern industries.