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The Kremlin said Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to resume U.S.-mediated peace talks with Ukraine as soon as next month, Reuters reported, Putin met U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff. The negotiations began with Russia releasing retired U.S. school teacher Stephen Hubbard, who has been held in Russia.Wednesday’s meeting took place as Kyiv and its allies worry the U.S. is moving to provide support to Russia, at times holding back real-time intelligence on Russian attacks and hobbling Ukraine’s military communications, the report noted. While observers have doubts over the potential for a breakthrough, the increased activity served to keep pressure on wheat and oil futures, in hopes for an easing of bottlenecks in the Black Sea.
The report said the Kremlin was less upbeat about the outcome of talks Witkoff had held a day earlier in Oslo with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the leaders of Finland and Norway, and European and NATO representatives. Witkoff told Putin the talks had been characterised by “some degree of momentum” and a U.S. official said Ukraine had brought new ideas and proposals, Reuters said. “These nuances, so to speak, do not entirely satisfy us,” Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters after the St Petersburg meeting.
- Maintain perspective: “All the latest statements and signals suggest that Moscow does not currently see an acceptable, or even remotely satisfactory, offer on the table,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder/CEO at R. Politik and senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, in an X post. “Yet it is prepared to engage in discussions for tactical gains, calculating that these, combined with the further deterioration of the Ukrainian state, may eventually produce a strategic shift in Russia’s favour.”
Market recap: Corn futures eked out a gain after hitting a three-month low, with short covering seen amid heavily oversold technical conditions and some bargain-hunting interest. Wheat and soybeans finished lower but off of session lows. Cattle hit another round of three-month highs, while lean hogs continued to languish.
- December corn ended 1 ¼ cents higher at $4.63 ¼.
- November soybeans fell 3 cents to $12.45 ¼ after hitting a seven-week low.
- December soybean meal lost $0.40 to end at $348.30.
- December soybean oil dropped 76 points to 65.97 cents, hitting a four-month low.
- December soft red winter wheat fell 15 cents to $6.28 ¼, falling to a more than three-month low.
- December hard red winter wheat dropped 18 cents to $6.73, and notched a three-month low.
- December spring wheat lost 10 ¼ cents, ending at $6.51 ½.
- December cotton gained 95 points to close at a three-week high of 81.83 cents.
- December live cattle rose $0.95 to end at $231.125, while November feeders gained $2.525 to $348.825, with both hitting three-month highs.
- December lean-hog futures dropped $1.425 to close at $65.725 after hitting another contract low.
Breaking the cattle data blackout… USDA is overhauling regional cash fed cattle reporting as a persistent data blackout spreads across major feeding states, implementing directives under two White House Executive Orders aimed at livestock competition and rancher support, reports Angie Stump Denton and Michelle Rook. Beginning with the afternoon market reports on Monday, USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) will begin publishing an aggregated cash cattle regional report that combines data from Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas. The goal is to restore price transparency to the Southern Plains and Western feeding belts, where shrinking negotiated cash trade had caused published USDA market reports to go completely dark under federal confidentiality restrictions, but analysts warn structural price-discovery challenges persist. Read the full story here.
Existential threat… A severe, decades-long megadrought and intense human water consumption have cut the Rio Grande’s natural flow by around 85%, creating a critical water crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported. Near-record low snowpacks and depleted reservoirs, such as Elephant Butte in New Mexico dropping to just 1.4% capacity in July, are leaving stretches of the river almost completely dry, the report said. The shrinking river is pushing many farmers to scale back agricultural production or shut it down. And it has also escalated legal and diplomatic disputes between states and between the U.S. and Mexico, which have a water-sharing agreement. The waterway’s decline poses an existential threat to Elephant Butte and surrounding farms, the report said.
- “If this drought continues, it will kill our little valley,” Victoria Franzoy, a fourth-generation farmer near Hatch, told the Journal.
U.S. orders some personnel out of Saudi Arabia… The US State Department has ordered some personnel to leave Saudi Arabia amid a rise in attacks from Iran-backed Houthi militants on the kingdom, the Financial Times reported. The order came after two people were killed in a drone attack that targeted Saudi Aramco’s giant Shaybah oilfield, the latest in a series of assaults on the nation’s oil infrastructure as the impact of the Iran war spreads across the region, the report said. The State Department cited the Houthi attacks in its decision regarding “non-emergency US government employees and their family members in Saudi Arabia”, according to a spokesperson on Wednesday.
Websites go dark… Government websites in Europe and elsewhere went dark Wednesday after the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language sparked a scramble to protect systems, Reuters reported. Developers of the PHP programming language said Tuesday they had identified two critical vulnerabilities and urged users to update their sites as soon as a fix was released, the report said. They announced a new version Wednesday that was fixing vulnerabilities, but government agencies in the Netherlands and Finland were among those that took sites offline ahead of the fix as a precaution.