It is grain, not a domestic market. Péter Magyar said so on RTL, on Saturday: if the Ukrainian wagons only cross Hungary, there is no obstacle. Zelensky asked him on Friday, at their first bilateral meeting, in Brussels. Maize in sealed trains, towards Western Europe. That is all. It is not a domestic tender. It is not a Hungarian silo.

The request also fell on Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The model is the one from the start of the invasion, three or four years ago, later dropped. Reuters puts the background figure: about 90 percent of Ukraine’s wheat, maize and sunflower-seed exports used to go across the Black Sea. There, the Budapest wire writes, Russian attacks have almost halted agricultural exit from the ports. That is the grain route, not a Hungarian warehouse.

Magyar is not Orbán. He inherited, from the previous government, the state of emergency and the ban on Ukrainian farm products. On Friday he reset the tone. Solidarity against “inhuman Russian aggression”. Weapons, still, no. Rights of the Hungarian minority, yes. In the same week the Rada passed a law on minority education. Magyar called it “a first step towards rebuilding mutual trust”. A first step is not a treaty.

Poland is, in parallel, blocking one chapter of Ukraine’s EU accession talks, for fear of its own farmers. In late August the European Commission put the EU maize harvest at 50.1 million tonnes: near a two-decade low, about a fifth below the average of the past three years. Heat and drought hit France and Hungary hardest. Transit does not fill the Hungarian silo. It passes beside it.

RTL is the television. Reuters is the wire. The Kyiv Independent put the headline. Magyar spoke with a condition: “as long as it merely transits the country”. Poland, Romania and Slovakia have not, in this article, signed the same yes. They received the same request.

Until the wagons, it remains a prime minister’s sentence. After the wagons, the scale remains. Anyone who mixes them turns an interview into a harvest.

Image: Beroesz, grain being loaded into wagons at Szentes station, 9 June 2010, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The photograph shows a Hungarian station in 2010, not the sealed trains Magyar described.

Sources consulted: Hungary ready to allow Ukrainian grain transit to Western Europe, prime minister says — The Kyiv Independent; Zelenskiy asked neighbours to let grain cargoes through, Hungary PM Magyar says — Reuters via Yahoo.