Zelenskyy asks Romania and other neighbours to let Ukrainian grain pass through as Black Sea exports stall
Ukraine's president has asked Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary to open their territory to transit shipments of Ukrainian grain while exports through the Black Sea are blocked, Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar said. Budapest says it will not stand in the way as long as the cargo only crosses the country.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has asked Ukraine's western neighbours, including Romania, to let Ukrainian grain move across their territory by land while the country's usual export route through the Black Sea is blocked. The request was made public by Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar, who said in an interview with the broadcaster RTL on Saturday that Zelenskyy had raised it with Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and all the other countries bordering Ukraine.
According to Magyar, Kyiv wants a return to the arrangement used in the first months after Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, when neighbouring states opened rail and road corridors for Ukrainian farm exports. "He asked them to allow transit, as they did three or four years ago, at the start of the war," the Hungarian leader said. He added that Zelenskyy told him in their face-to-face talks that it would help Ukraine a great deal to be able to send maize to Western Europe in sealed trains.
Magyar, who agreed with Zelenskyy on Friday to relaunch relations between Budapest and Kyiv, said Hungary would raise no objection on one condition: the grain must only cross Hungarian territory and be destined for other markets, not for Hungary's domestic market. "I said that as long as it is only transiting the country, there will be no obstacle," he said. He has taken a less confrontational line towards Kyiv than his predecessor, Viktor Orbán, while repeating that Hungary will not send weapons to Ukraine and calling for progress on the rights of the ethnic Hungarian minority there.
The stakes are high for Ukraine's economy. Around 90% of its exports of wheat, maize and sunflower seeds normally leave through Black Sea ports, according to Reuters. With that route disrupted, moving the harvest by rail across the European Union becomes one of the few alternatives for keeping exports flowing.
For Romania the request is sensitive. The country's ports and railways, and Constanța in particular, were among the main routes for Ukrainian grain after 2022, but the surge of cheap imports later triggered farmer protests in Romania and other frontline states and led to temporary restrictions on Ukrainian grain sales. That is why transit-only arrangements, in which the cargo is not sold locally, are at the centre of the discussion.
The proposal also comes at a difficult moment for European agriculture. At the end of August the European Commission estimated that the EU's 2026 maize harvest, the bloc's second most important cereal crop, would reach 50.1 million tonnes, its lowest level in almost two decades and roughly a fifth below the average of the past three years. Farmers in France and Hungary were among the hardest hit by record heat and drought. Meanwhile, Ukraine's winter sowing campaign continues: by 14 October farmers had planted 3.39 million hectares, about 65% of the planned area, according to the Ukrinform news agency.