THE ECONOMIST is at a conference in Kiev, organised by the Kyiv Post, a newspaper. Most delegates speak in glowing terms about how Ukraine’s economy, currently moribund, will in time be one of Europe’s most prosperous. (Jaded observers at the conference say they have heard it all before.) But few are talking about something much more pressing. Politicians are fighting over Ukraine’s proposed budget for next year; if things don’t go to plan, 2016 could look very tricky. There are two competing proposals for the budget. One, which is being pushed by the Ministry of Finance, is a fairly sensible plan. It will eliminate a range of tax loopholes and would also cut some spending. With that budget, Ukraine would probably run a budget deficit of about 4% of GDP next year. The IMF, which has arranged a bail-out with Ukraine, is happy with it.

But the IMF is not so happy with the competing proposal, which has come from a member of the party of Petro Poroshenko, the president. This plan envisages hefty tax cuts, but also keeps plenty of loopholes. For that reason it is politically far more palatable. But that budget would probably lead to Ukraine running a budget deficit of 10% of GDP next year, entirely unsustainable for a government that cannot borrow on private markets.

The worry, then, is that the parliament votes for the second budget, leading the IMF to stop disbursing bail-out funds to Ukraine. The IMF is supposed to release about $2 billion before the end of the year, according to Timothy Ash of Nomura, a bank, but has held off over the budget spat. Some say that this is not really a problem: after all, Ukraine’s foreign-exchange reserves are far higher than they were a year or so ago. Ukraine, the argument goes, could quite easily survive next year without IMF funds.

Perhaps. Ukraine just about meets one rule of thumb: that foreign-exchange reserves should be equal to at least three months of imports. Reserves currently sit at about $13 billion. But if the IMF disengages from Ukraine, things could turn nasty pretty fast: the hryvnia, Ukraine’s currency, could come under more pressure and, as investors take fright, reserves could start to shrink. After all the hard work of the last year (culminating in the end of the recession in the third quarter) the government, entirely unnecessarily, risks triggering another round of economic turmoil. It needs to get its act together and pass a budget—fast.

What makes the whole thing especially frustrating is that squabbling over the public finances is a distraction from what investors and ordinary Ukrainians really care about—corruption. Almost everyone at the conference agrees that the government has made nowhere near enough progress on that front.