[cunning_fish]

>>>There’s more dignity in cleaning European toilets than being a government victim accepting pennies working in a subsidized coal mine, in my opinion<<<

Subsidized by whom?:)

[Ivan Mazepa]

I’m not saying Westerners subsidize the East, subsidies are from the central government in Kiev. The East contributes the most to the country’s budget, but they also take out the most. It’s a zero sum game, the net benefit is zero, (or negative, I can’t recall at the moment) I can post a reference when I get home, if you like

[Ivan Mazepa]

It's difficult to find something which directly shows 'money in' versus 'money out' for each region because a business operating in Donetsk might be registered and pays taxes in Kiev or worse yet, offshore.

Below is a link to an article and a map of Ukraine showing budget revenues and expenses by region
http://www.investgazeta.net/ekonomika/zona-proedanija-164683/
Dark green are those that contribute the most to the budget per capita, dark red are those that are deep in the red, other colors are in between)

The article also mentions the problem of where the business is registered to pay tax (thus the high values for Kiev) so the map could be a representation of where individuals pay their taxes and collect their subsidies.

You can draw your own conclusions from this. For me, it's not conclusive as I would've liked. There is other data, like salary by region (but it wouldn't show migrant worker salaries) or employment data (officially, East and West are 2-3% apart) but it's not very telling.

If you like, here's Donetsk on the map: 10% of the population, 13% of the country's GDP and 27% of the country's subsidies