To me, the biggest factor in all of this is time. You can't really make a tree grow faster than it naturally does and I think the same goes for nations. We're always trying to engineer things to be faster, but it doesn't really work b/c it is against the nature of the thing.

Ukraine just had another election and the same old characters are there. Having Hilary as a pen pal didn't help Yulia. Nothing much will change. Over time, these people will move on (shuffle on quickly please) and a new generation will take control and they will be a bit more evolved than the last (we hope) and so on....eventually, there will be a critical mass of political evolution and things will change. But it takes time to dig out from the soviet legacy.