THE romance between Ukraine and the European Union is full of unmet expectations. Ukraine wants commitment from the EU; the EU wants proof that Ukraine has really changed. When EU officials visited Kiev on April 27th for a joint summit, they snubbed Ukraine’s requests for a peacekeeping force in the Donbas, for additional military aid and for visa-free travel. Western financial assistance is trickling in, but Ukraine wants more. “Greece already received $300 billion, with no war, with no Russian tanks,” Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the prime minister, said after the summit. Ukraine, he complained, has received just one-tenth as much.

The EU says help will come, but only after reforms. “You keep reforming, we keep supporting,” said the European Commission’s president, Jean-Claude Juncker. European leaders want to see Ukraine implement its new laws and decentralise governance, as agreed in the Minsk peace plan. Some worry that failure to do this will invite Russia to relaunch the war. Already violence is ticking up near the rebel capital of Donetsk and the Ukrainian-held port of Mariupol.

Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, takes umbrage at charges that reforms are lagging. Lawmakers recently passed legislation to break up gas monopolies, increase energy-sector competition, and unbundle the state gas conglomerate Naftogaz, a fiscal black hole. Last month Mr Poroshenko picked a head for the newly created National Anti-Corruption Bureau.

Yet the biggest test will be the struggle against Ukraine’s oligarchs. The latest battle pits the state against the country’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov. The government wants to end Mr Akhmetov’s coal and electricity monopolies, and may let his holding company, DTEK, go bankrupt. Coal miners have taken to Kiev’s streets, banging their helmets and calling for the energy minister to resign. Mustafa Nayyem, a reformist legislator, published leaked documents allegedly issued by DTEK that set out plans to engineer protests. DTEK said it “did not know the source of the documents”, but did not deny that they were genuine.

Following the miners’ march, Mr Poroshenko vowed that those who put pressure on the state “will get their knuckles rapped”. In a column in the Guardian, a British newspaper, Mr Poroshenko boasted of taking down Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch forced to resign as a regional governor last month after he deployed armed guards to protect his oil-industry assets from government reforms. But Europe does not want de-oligarchisation to become a game of whack-a-mole led by Mr Poroshenko, who is himself an oligarch. It wants Ukraine systematically to transform the oligarchs’ empires into law-abiding big businesses. Until that happens, Ukraine may feel itself to be in a relationship with the EU, one that could even lead towards membership—but the EU will respond that things are complicated.