* Wheat reaches limit-up on escalating Black Sea tensions
* Soybeans and corn hit contract highs (Updates for market close, recasts to focus on wheat)
CHICAGO, Aug 26 (Reuters) – Chicago most-active wheat futures hit their daily limit and set fresh multi-year highs on Wednesday on news that Russia is considering stepping up ballistic missile strikes on Kyiv.
The new development underscored a pattern of escalating tensions that has caused disruption to Black Sea grain exports and kept uncertainty over global availability.
Every corn and soybean contract also hit life-of-contract highs on spillover support from soaring wheat futures.
The most actively traded wheat contract on the Chicago Board of Trade rose 45 cents to $7.48-1/4 per bushel.
Russia’s strikes could include targets in the city centre of Kyiv, and on critical infrastructure elsewhere in Ukraine after concluding that efforts to negotiate a peace deal have reached a dead end, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing three people close to the Kremlin.
The report said negotiation frameworks had effectively collapsed, while President Vladimir Putin remained unlikely to end the war in response to sanctions or Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries and logistics networks.
A virtual halt to grain loadings at Russian and Ukrainian Black Sea ports due to tit-for-tat attacks in recent weeks has cast doubt over flows of Ukrainian corn and particularly Russian wheat.
Most-active corn rose 13 cents to $5.36-1/2 per bushel on spillover strength from wheat futures and poor yield expectations for the U.S. corn crop.
The benchmark earlier rose to $5.38-3/4 per bushel, its highest since the summer of 2023 and surpassing a previous three-year peak from Tuesday. The rally in corn has been fuelled by results from a widely followed Midwest field tour last week that projected this year’s U.S. crop well below the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s current forecast. All CBOT corn contracts set life-of-contract highs on Wednesday. The USDA on Monday estimated that U.S. corn crop conditions fell more sharply last week than analysts anticipated.
CBOT soybeans ticked 28-1/4 cents higher to $12.66 a bushel as China continued purchasing U.S. soybeans and crude oil prices recovered.
The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday announced new sanctions on 60 individuals, entities and vessels that the U.S. said were trading partners with Iran, but the list did not include any Chinese financial institutions.
“I think a lot were surprised China was excluded from the sanction list from, and it gives us more heart that China will continue to buy soybeans,” said Dan Basse, president of AgResource Company.
(Reporting by Heather Schlitz in Chicago. Additional reporting by Gus Trompiz in Paris and Daphne Zhang and Lewis Jackson in Beijing; Editing by Kirsten Donovan, Lisa Shumaker and Deepa Babington)
