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A bright new Hungarian flag flutters above the Bulgarian barge nosing its way up the Danube in the heart of the Hungarian capital, a symbol of the new reality facing many shippers who ply the Danube.
Until this spring, the Danube, Europe's second longest waterway after the Volga river in Russia, was the cheapest way to ship some bulk products from the Black Sea to Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Bavaria and other parts of central Europe.
Since April 1, however, when Nato bombs brought the first of three bridges in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad crashing into the international waterway, the river has been cut in two.
The Bulgarian vessel is one of many from that country that were left stranded on the upper Danube. Despairing of the slow progress towards clearing the river since the end of the war, some owners have reflagged the vessels to allow them to do at least some work on the surviving, upper Danube stretch.
A meeting today between the transport ministers of Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine - the three downriver countries most dependent on shipping for their livelihoods - will attempt to hammer out a common response to the problem. However, objections from Belgrade are threatening to keep downriver barges away from their home ports well into the new year.
To Dusan Dimitrejivic, the question is a straightforward one. He is an economic affairs counsellor at the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest, which also serves as the country's mission to the International Danube Commission, the body set up by treaty to oversee the Danube's operation. His main concern, he says, is to ensure the safety of the river if it is reopened to traffic.
However, he also says that Belgrade will not allow the river to be cleared until all three bridges over the Danube that were destroyed by Nato have been rebuilt, at the expense of Nato members. "Bridges are an economic facility," he says. "They enable transportation of goods, transportation of people. We should really be putting our best efforts jointly into overcoming this brutal attack on the Danube."
Other countries believe the Serbs are dragging their feet to force the international community to lift economic sanctions, which prohibit giving reconstruction aid to Belgrade until Yugoslavia has been democratised, presumably with the fall of the nationalist government of Slobodan Milosevic, president.
Gabor Horvath, spokesman for the Hungarian foreign ministry, says that while rebuilding the bridges would be viewed as structural aid, demining and clearing the river of wreckage would be humanitarian aid, which is still permitted. The Yugoslav authorities are unwilling to separate the two issues.
For countries immediately upstream of Serbia, such as Croatia and Hungary, the problem is particularly pressing because of fears that ice could form on the wreckage if the winter is harsh, damming the river and causing floods upstream. Downstream, the pain is more purely economic. Serbia has imposed a system of licensing on vessels wishing to bypass the blockage via the Serbian canal system. The Yugoslav authorities have been accused of discriminating against licence applications from Romanian and Bulgarian tug owners because of their support for Nato's air bombing campaign during the Kosovo war.
The canals are, in fact, of little use to larger vessels as the locks on the waterways are short. But frustration with the continuing difficulties have led owners of the Romanian Danube fleet, one of the largest on the river, to stage a three-day blockade last week. In retaliation for Yugoslav moves, Romania has closed its own Black Sea canal to Yugoslav vessels, some of which it has impounded at the Black Sea port of Constanta.
For most countries, however, the blockade has not been catastrophic, according to Laszlo Csaba, professor of economics at Budapest University. While some 100m tonnes of freight were shipped on the Danube at its peak in 1987, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and changing trade patterns in post-Communist eastern Europe reduced the flow to 40m tonnes last year.
That will be small comfort to those who have seen their livelihoods ruined by the blockage. Nor will the comparatively small cost of clearing the damage if a political solution can be found. According to Mr Horvath, all that is needed to clear the river is E14m ($14.5m).