Volodymyr Zelensky will meet Keir Starmer in Downing Street today along with Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz to discuss the latest US-led peace proposal for ending the war in Ukraine. Last night, following days of negotiations between US and Ukrainian officials, Donald Trump said he was “disappointed” with the Ukrainian leader, claiming he “hasn’t yet read the proposal”. Thailand has launched airstrikes on Cambodia after accusing Cambodian forces of killing at least one Thai soldier during border clashes overnight. Each side has blamed the other for instigating the renewed outbreak of violence, which marks the collapse of a ceasefire brokered by the Trump administration six weeks ago. Britons looking for a new home this year were most inclined to search for off-grid, rural retreats, according to the property site Zoopla. Its most viewed listing was a rather modest three-bed house in Carmarthenshire, south-west Wales, which has solar panels, a vegetable garden and space for chickens.

Is Hegseth guilty of war crimes?

President Trump’s critics are convinced his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has committed a war crime, says Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post. Back in September, the US military carried out a so-called “double tap” strike on suspected drug smugglers in a boat off the Venezuelan coast: an initial missile, followed by a second hit to finish off the survivors. But if Hegseth is guilty of war crimes – and he denies personally issuing the order – then so is Barack Obama. On taking office in 2009, the Democratic president “dramatically escalated” the use of lethal drone strikes, including double taps. He personally authorised more than 540 such hits against terror suspects in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, killing an estimated 3,797 people. As Obama reportedly told aides: “Turns out, I’m really good at killing people.”

Sorry, but there is a “world of legal and moral differences” here, says former Obama administration official Jeh Johnson in The New York Times. First, Trump has effectively declared war against these drug cartels, without authorisation from Congress. Obama’s strikes, by contrast, were against al-Qaeda and its successors, as authorised by lawmakers in the wake of 9/11. Second, the terror targets in Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen were “beyond the reach of law enforcement”. The same cannot be said for these cartels, whose boats are routinely intercepted by the Coast Guard and the Navy. Using lethal force as a “convenient and expedient substitute” for law enforcement is the definition of “extrajudicial killing”. The Trump administration claims its legal justification for these strikes is classified, but that’s absurd. This looks like a government “shooting first and backfilling the legal reasoning later”.

🪖🇮🇶 I wish Hegseth’s “disdain” for the laws of war were unique, says David Ignatius in The Washington Post. But recall the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which American guards sexually humiliated and abused Iraqi prisoners in 2003. Or the My Lai massacre in 1968, when American soldiers killed an estimated 347 unarmed civilians, mostly women and children. Whether we like it or not, the history of warfare is in part about “the barbarity of killing and attempts to restrain it”.