In the end, everything had to happen very quickly.

All of a sudden, other bidders were breathing down Tahir Musayev's neck.

It made no difference that he had made a substantial upfront payment on the purchase of the Slovak company.

Andreas Mihm

Business correspondent for Austria, Central and Eastern Europe and Turkey based in Vienna.

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"It didn't help," Musayev said, hunched over a plate of steaming borscht in the spick and span canteen of his new headquarters, which was badly in need of renovation. "The others came and said, 'We'll pay more and then we'll throw you out.'

So we paid the balance immediately.”

Wild West in the East, mid-March 2022. Russia's invasion was only a few weeks ago.

The invaders are deep in Ukraine, dropping bombs on cities and factories, shelling roads and bridges, tearing up fields with tank tracks.

Is this the time for far-reaching deals?

"Grain Alliance" with 400,000 tons of harvest

Grain wholesaler Musayev did not have to think long about this.

He has invested a few million euros in 3.5 hectares of land on the Slovakian-Ukrainian border, in a dilapidated administration building with a rusty fence, in front of which the driveway is lined with potholes and behind which the muddy January soil makes every step a smacking noise.

And then there would be a few tracks and a concrete silo, in which an old Berlin tenement would fit well: 27 meters long, 25 meters wide, 44 meters high.

A brown and yellow monster with 48 concrete ribs, each four in width and twice six in length.

Now it is not that there are no granaries in Slovakia.

They can be seen for a long way out of the damp, bush-lined plain of fields.

Some even with rail connection.

But only one has two, the one at the Cierna nad Tisou transshipment hub: on the right, the tracks with the wide gauges of the east, on the left, the narrower European tracks, onto which the freight heading west can be “re-gauged”.

That makes a difference.

Especially if you want to sell corn, soy and wheat from Ukraine to customers in the West.

Like Tahir Musayev.

As Chief Operating Officer on the board of the Ukrainian Grain Alliance, he is responsible for day-to-day business.

The agricultural company, which is owned by Swedish investors, has a good 60,000 hectares under the plough.

That is about a thousand times the size of an average German farm of 64 hectares.

Still, by Ukrainian standards, the “grain alliance” is only a medium-sized agricultural company with a harvest of 400,000 tons.

Closer to Russia than to the EU

That didn't diminish the problems after the Russian incursion, when Musayev sat on 120,000 tons of grain, dried, aerated and stored in silos closer to Russia than the EU.

90,000 tons were sold, but did not find their way to the customer.

If a delivery made it to the ship in a Black Sea port like Mykolayev or Odessa, buyers refused to accept it.