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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dissolved the war cabinet he set up in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack following the resignation of two of its five members.

The body, headed by Netanyahu, has overseen Israel’s war in Gaza for the past eight months. However, its dissolution had been expected since the resignations last week of Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, two centrist politicians who joined Netanyahu’s coalition at the start of the war.

Following their departures, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich — ultranationalists whose positions have frequently drawn fierce criticism from Israel’s allies, including the US — had demanded to be admitted to the war cabinet.

But according to Israeli officials, Netanyahu will instead now hold meetings in smaller forums to discuss sensitive matters. The wider security cabinet, which includes Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, will also continue to deal with matters relating to the war, officials said.

Gantz and Eisenkot demanded the establishment of the war cabinet, which also included defence minister Yoav Gallant and strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer, as a condition of joining Netanyahu’s emergency government last year.

The arrangement was designed to sideline Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who have repeatedly demanded a more aggressive approach to the war in Gaza as well as the re-establishment of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian enclave.

They have also opposed concessions that would have allowed a deal to free the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.

While the entry of Gantz — a longtime rival of Netanyahu — into the war cabinet briefly brought a veneer of unity to Israeli politics, in recent months, he and Eisenkot have become increasingly critical of Netanyahu’s conduct of the war.

Gantz has accused the Israeli prime minister, who depends on Ben-Gvir’s and Smotrich’s parties for his majority in parliament, of allowing decisions relating to the war to be affected by narrow political calculations.

The tensions came to a head earlier this month when Gantz pulled his National Unity alliance out of the emergency government and resigned from the war cabinet after Netanyahu ignored his demands for a series of policy shifts, including drawing up a plan for the aftermath of the war.

Eisenkot said he and Gantz left the government after the war cabinet was “infiltrated” by “ulterior motives and political considerations”, and described Ben-Gvir as “the alternate prime minister”.

Netanyahu’s office on Saturday accused the pair of lying, insisting the prime minister made decisions based only on Israel’s national security needs.

CNN
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American journalist Evan Gershkovich will stand trial behind closed doors in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg starting on June 26, state-run news agency TASS reported Monday, citing the court’s press service.

Gershkovich, 32, has been imprisoned since he was arrested while on a reporting trip in March last year by the FSB, Russia’s federal security service, which accused him of trying to obtain state secrets. Gershkovich, the US government and his employer, the Wall Street Journal, have vehemently denied the charges against him.

The Russian Prosecutor General’s office said last Thursday it had approved the indictment and referred Gershkovich’s case to a trial court. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

The case will be heard in the Sverdlovsk Regional Court, TASS reported Monday.

For more than a year since his arrest, Gershkovich has been imprisoned in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison, and his pre-trial detention period had been extended numerous times. The trial venue of Yekaterinburg is more than 1,100 miles east of the capital.

Last week, Russian prosecutors said the FSB had “established and documented” that Gershkovich was acting on CIA instructions in the month he was arrested, alleging he had “collected secret information” about a Russian tank factory.

“Gershkovich carried out the illegal actions using painstaking conspiratorial methods,” it said in a statement.

Gershkovich’s detention has been a source of tension between Washington and Moscow, whose relations were already deeply strained due to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

The White House has previously alleged the Kremlin is using Gershkovich, the first American reporter detained in Russia on allegations of spying since the Cold War, as a geopolitical hostage.

On Thursday, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the allegations against Gershkovich have “absolutely zero credibility.”

“We have been clear from the start that Evan has done nothing wrong. He should never have been arrested in the first place. Journalism is not a crime. The charges against him are false, and the Russian government knows that they’re false. He should be released immediately,” Miller said at a State Department briefing.

Gershkovich is among a number of Americans being held in Russia, including former Marine Paul Whelan, whom the US State Department has also declared as wrongfully detained.

The US has repeatedly warned American citizens not to travel to Russia.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

EU leaders plan to approve Ursula von der Leyen for a second five-year term as president of the European Commission on Monday evening, as the bloc’s capitals choose continuity over change amid the war in Ukraine, tensions with China and political uncertainty in key countries. 

The heads of the EU’s 27 member states will use a private dinner in Brussels on Monday evening to give political backing to von der Leyen remaining in office, diplomats and officials from across the continent said, ahead of a formal rubber-stamping later this month.

“Nobody is discussing any other outcome,” said a senior EU diplomat who has spent the past week in discussions with key capitals. “For her, the die is cast.”

Von der Leyen would then need to win a majority of the newly elected European parliament to remain as the EU’s most powerful official through 2029, running the bloc’s executive branch with the power to regulate the world’s largest single market, propose new legislation and steer the continent’s policy direction.

Her supporters are quietly confident of securing parliament’s assent, given the victory of her centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) in the EU elections this month, and the majority held by centrist parties in the chamber despite a surge in support for the far right.

Von der Leyen is respected for her leadership of the EU through the Covid-19 pandemic and the bloc’s response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But she has irked some capitals and many in her own commission with her centralised decision-making and a record of pushing the limits of her institutional powers. 

Her campaign stressed the value of stability, and played up the dangers of a change in leadership given the war in Ukraine and the uncertainty in the US-EU relationship that would result from a potential Donald Trump victory in US elections in November.

Her supporters have reinforced that message in the light of the political chaos unleashed in France by President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap election — a move that startled EU allies who worry about the future influence of the far-right in Paris.

Monday’s private dinner will also feature discussions on who to select for president of the EU Council — the official who chairs meetings of bloc leaders — and for high representative, the bloc’s chief diplomat. 

Officials said Portugal’s former premier António Costa was the clear frontrunner for the former, succeeding Charles Michel, while Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas was the most likely choice for the latter, taking over from Josep Borrell.

They cautioned, however, that on the eve of the meeting, neither choice was as definite as von der Leyen.

Von der Leyen, a former German defence minister who was an unheralded choice for the post in 2019, received a boost last week from the bloc’s three most powerful members — France, Germany and Italy — offering their tacit acceptance at the G7 summit.

Following the summit on Italy’s Apulian coast on Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said they believed a deal would be struck at Monday’s dinner, while Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she believed the EPP had the right “to propose a commission president”.

The private dinner has been arranged as a prelude to a formal summit on June 27 and 28 at which a final agreement is due. A parliamentary vote on the next commission president is set for the week of July 15.

“Everyone wants to use [Monday] night to send a crystal clear message . . . so there’s no doubt over what the final decision will be,” said a second senior EU diplomat involved in the negotiations.