IN 2014 Ukrainian GDP fell by 7%; in 2015 it shrunk by an astonishing 12%. The whole economy is indeed in trouble; the hryvnia, the currency, has lost about 70% against the dollar in the past two years. Inflation is very high (though it is now subsiding). However, what's often lost in analysis is that different parts of the country are doing very differently. The war has been concentrated in the east of the country (Donetsk and Luhansk). To show the economic damage this has caused, we've looked at how much construction is going on in different provinces (this is a decent proxy for GDP growth). Data from a warzone are hardly reliable, but there is a regional pattern to Ukraine's economic woes. In January-November 2015 Donetsk's construction shrank by an astonishing 60% on the previous year.

But western Ukraine is clearly doing decently. In the first three quarters of 2015 Lviv, a city in the west from where your correspondent is writing this, had one of the biggest jumps in employment of any province in Ukraine. And construction is doing rather well (luxury flats are popping up across the city and hipster bars are opening).

Of course, such a contrast is not terribly surprising. Lviv is well over 1,000km away from Donetsk; and its economy, with a heavy concentration of services like IT, is a world away from the coal-mining and steel of the east. Basically they are entirely different economies, which talk of "Ukraine" ignores.

The IMF has highlighted this pattern before. In 2014, across Ukraine as a whole industrial production fell by 10%. In Donetsk and Luhansk, which normally account for about 16% of Ukrainian GDP, it fell by 32% and 42% respectively.

Now this has implications for Ukraine's overall GDP growth. Take away Donetsk and Luhansk, and industrial production fell by "just" 4.6% in 2014.

Using industrial production as a proxy for GDP, some back-of-the-envelope calculations would suggest that the "non-war" parts of Ukraine saw a GDP drop of about 4% in 2014. Imagine similar ratios for 2015, and you're looking at a GDP decline of maybe 8-9%. Now obviously this is still a severe recession, but remember: the country is at war. (Ukrainian growth is roughly comparable to Greek growth in 2011-12.)

All this goes to show that while the Ukrainian economy is really struggling, things are not equally bad everywhere.