Many articles on the topic of outsourcing to Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Russia etc. discuss establishing offshore development centers (ODC, unfortunately no comprehensible definition in Wikipedia). But ODC is not the only and for sure not the single universally effective means of offshore outsourcing.

For example, Outsourcing to Ukraine: Why the US$246 Million Industry Is Expanding to the Provinces provides a good analysis of Ukraine's outsourcing industry geography and other internal drivers:

... [Ukraine] has a large pool of highly educated people and the geographical location was convenient. He found the English competency of his employees was better than in China. And the cultural differences were less noticeable compared to those in India and China.

Many of the challenges described in this article and associated risks can be transferred to outsourcing vendor. This is a great idea for companies which do not have software development as their core competency or smaller companies for which it is not feasible to establish ODC. In this case vendor will provide you with certain level of service and take care of all the risks.

How much more can we outsource? gives a good notion of difference between 'outsourcing' and 'offshoring'. And when you contract offshore outsourcing provider such as SoftServe, you will be able to realize offshore benefits without all the burden of managing a branch in another country.