Your experience seems quite right, although I wonder why you had troubles buying currency - until recently everybody was really hungry for dollars. It's harder to buy some, sure, but we're talking investing western money, converting it to UAH and paying workers in Ukraine those UAHs.

As as said - risks are still most definitely present, and some big ones with that, but Ukraine still presents tons of opportunities. 'Oiling the gears' is the main problem, of course, and has to be dealt with to make massive changes, so I'll leave it out for now. But otherwise - you have cheap land, lots of really cheap high qualified workforce (pretty much any junior-medium coder/developer would be glad to work for $1k-$1.5k/month), reasonably large market for pretty much anything domestic-made, since imported goods are unbearably expensive. So if you feel like importing raw materials and making it in Ukraine with Ukrainian workforce - it could be quite a profitable idea.

Would recommend some experience working with eastern EU - sure, that's true for the region as a whole, but recent trends are to 'westernize' everything, including business models, so it should be better over time.

Then again - I'm mostly praising future possibilities of the country, not the current state, which, while better, is still quite pathetic. The 'investment map' meant pretty much that the country started to get noticed at all, and as time passes some people are starting to carefully try out the new grounds. Pre-revolution Ukraine was nothing but a stagnated swamp of rotten bureaucracy and corrupted systems. So at least shaking this up is a great thing for the country itself, potentially.