Joe Biden has accidentally introduced the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as “President Putin” in a gaffe that will fuel further concerns about his mental acuity that have threatened to scuttle his presidential campaign.

Biden made the mistake while flanked by Nato leaders during a signing ceremony alongside Zelenskiy on the final day of the Nato summit in Washington. It came just an hour before a rare press conference by Biden that has been called “make-or-break” for his campaign, as a growing number of political allies and donors have been calling for him to drop out of the race.

Concluding his opening remarks, Biden handed over to Zelenskiy with the words: “Now I want to hand it over to the president of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination.”

He said: “Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin!”

A number of European leaders began clapping hesitantly. German chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni turned their heads in surprise as Biden mentioned the Russian leader, while other European leaders broke into an awkward smattering of applause.

Realising his mistake, Biden caught himself and said: “President Putin! We’re going to beat President Putin. President Zelenskiy. I’m so focused on beating Putin. We’ve got to worry about it. Anyway, Mr President.”

“I’m better,” Zelenskiy said, shaking Biden’s hand.

“You are a hell of a lot better,” Biden responded in concluding his remarks.

The remark elicited gasps in a press centre, where hundreds of journalists were watching the remarks live on an internal television feed. A number of people in the room shouted out “Zelenskiy” to correct Biden’s mistake, after which he returned to the podium.

Zelenskiy had been due to give a press conference at the end of the Nato summit an hour later. But journalists who were waiting were told at short notice that the event was cancelled – meaning he didn’t have to respond to questions about Biden’s gaffe.

The news about the mistake quickly filtered into other press conferences with heads of government, rehashing questions about Biden’s mental state that have loomed over the conference since it began.

Keir Starmer, asked about President Biden’s gaffe, insisted that the Nato summit had made breakthroughs that were welcomed by President Zelenskiy and had left Nato in a stronger position.

Pressed by reporters on whether the US president was capable of serving another four years in office, he said: “Look, I was with him last night. We spent the best part of an hour together. We covered a lot of ground.

“We’ve been through two days of this council and come to a very good outcome. He’s led through all, spoken at every session, pulled people together, and we got a good outcome and I think he should give credit for that.”

French president Emanuel Macron in his press conference said: “Slips of the tongue happen, it’s happened to me.”

Scholz was asked, in English, about Biden’s gaffe in a press conference a few minutes later. He sidestepped the question, and said he hoped that Biden would continue to strongly support Ukraine.

Joe Biden’s position appeared shaky on Thursday, amid reports that his aides and advisers were discussing how to persuade him to leave the presidential race while his own campaign was secretly testing Kamala Harris’s popularity, suggesting it was preparing for that very scenario.

Then just before the US president was scheduled to face journalists at a potentially pivotal news conference marking the end of Nato’s 75th anniversary summit, he spoke to reporters there and mistakenly referred to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as “President Putin”.

Biden quickly realised he had mixed up one of his international allies, who was there, with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and corrected himself, but the gaffe could not have come at a worse time.

Earlier, two separate New York Times reports suggested his efforts to keep his candidacy for re-election afloat were close to foundering.

The Times reported on its website that his campaign’s analytics team was quietly testing the strength of Harris, the vice-president, among voters in a match-up against Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.

Biden has consistently argued that he has the best chance of beating Trump, citing polling evidence.

A separate report suggested that unnamed longtime aides and advisers to the president had become convinced in recent days that his campaign to beat Trump in the election was doomed and were trying to find ways of persuading him of their argument.

The story was met by denial by the White House and the Biden campaign, which respectively called it “unequivocally not true” and “patently false”.

But the picture of diminishing support for the president even within his own camp was further strengthened by an NBC report suggesting that three people involved in his re-election campaign had written off his chances.

“He needs to drop out,” the network’s website quoted one Biden campaign official as saying. “He will never recover from this.”

The glut of damaging stories followed a number of Democratic party members calling on him to step down and as senators from the party prepared to meet key members of Biden’s staff at the White House to air their concerns about his electability following last month’s disastrous debate performance with Trump.

On Thursday afternoon, three more House Democrats called for Biden to withdraw, Greg Stanton of Arizona, Ed Case of Hawaii and Brad Schneider of Illinois.

Schneider said in a statement: “I fear if he fails to make the right choice, our democracy will hang in the balance,” while Stanton posted a statement on Twitter/X effusively praising Biden’s record and his character but saying he should step aside as the nominee amid the need to save US democracy from the “existential threat” of Donald Trump.

The Nato-related press conference set for Thursday evening was seen as crucial as a test to compare Biden’s performance with the dire one he displayed in the debate, followed by a less than convincing performance in a TV interview with ABC the following week.

The event is the kind of unscripted set piece that Biden’s staff stand accused of shielding him from, and any repeat of the calamitous debate display could turn the steady trickle of public calls for Biden to stand aside into a flood.

Some of Biden’s most loyal acolytes at the top of the Democratic party have issued less than full-throated statements of support in recent days.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, who has repeated the mantra “I’m for Joe” throughout the crisis, was reported to have signalled openness to having the president replaced at the top of the presidential ticket.

Axios reported that Schumer had been taking close account of the feelings of party donors and fellow senators in the 12 days since Biden’s meltdown in the 27 June debate, when he plunged the viability of his candidacy into doubt by abjectly failing to defend his own policies or counter Trump’s lies.

“As I have made clear repeatedly publicly and privately, I support President Biden and remain committed to ensuring Donald Trump is defeated in November,” Schumer said, in comments that fell short of a ringing endorsement. On Wednesday, Peter Welch of Vermont became the first Democratic senator to publicly tell Biden to step aside. Nine members of the House of Representatives have already done so.

“He saved us from Donald Trump once and wants to do it again. But he needs to reassess whether he is the best candidate to do so. In my view, he is not,” Welch wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece.

The president ostensibly retains the support of Democratic governors, senators in the vital swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, the Black congressional caucus, key progressive House members including Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and many others.

But a meeting between senators and Biden staff on Thursday apparently did not go particularly well, with reports that things got heated as the lawmakers complained Biden was not taking control of the situation and that they were in a very difficult situation. It took place against the backdrop of backstage manoeuvring. The former House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, placed added pressure on Biden on Wednesday by telling MSNBC that it was up to the president to decide, and “we are encouraging him to make that decision”. Behind the scenes, Pelosi has reportedly told Democratic Congress members that Biden cannot win the election and should step aside, according to Politico.

She has also reportedly encouraged Democrats in swing districts threatened with losing their seats in November to do whatever is necessary to defend themselves, including calling on Biden to stand aside.

Crucially, she is also said to have advised members to wait until the end of the Nato gathering before going public.

A fresh Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll showed 56% of Democratic voters agreeing that Biden should end his campaign, against 42% who said he should stay put – a finding that undermined the president’s assertion that the effort to oust him was led by “elites” in the party.

Biden has held fewer news conferences with journalists in his three and a half years in office than any president since Ronald Reagan.

A previous press conference at the White House in February to counter criticisms by Robert Hur, a special prosecutor who criticised the president’s “poor memory”, backfired somewhat when Biden referred to the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, as “the president of Mexico”.

On the face of it, it was a busy Nato summit, not short of outcomes: badly needed air defence systems and fighter jets for Ukraine and a commitment that Kyiv was on an “irreversible path” to membership – plus a cross-alliance warning to China for its discreet help to Russia as it continues its assault on Ukraine.

Yet, behind the activity lurks the cliff-edge of the US election. In the Washington heat, the worry is not so much about Joe Biden’s health, but the Democrats’ ability to defeat Donald Trump in the November election. The reality is that Nato will struggle if the US is sceptical, fitful or unengaged.

During the last Trump presidency, Nato survived by hunkering down, making minimal commitments during a period of less geopolitical uncertainty. This time, with a major war continuing on the edge of Europe, a dysfunctional Nato is not obviously an attractive option, but it nevertheless lingers.

Karin von Hippel, the director general of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, said: “Everybody is worried about Trump, everybody is worried about US commitments to Nato. Last time around Trump couldn’t do much damage because he didn’t understand how the bureaucracy works. But now he does.”

The plan had been for Biden to promote Nato, to Americans and to the world, at a summit in the US capital to mark the 75th year of the alliance. Speaking in the Mellon auditorium, the very room Nato’s founding treaty was signed in 1949, Biden emphasised the alliance’s durability could not be taken for granted – a point aimed at Trump.

“Let’s remember: the fact that Nato remains the bulwark of global security did not happen by accident. It wasn’t inevitable. Again and again, at critical moments, we chose unity over disunion, progress over retreat, freedom over tyranny, and hope over fear,” the president said on Tuesday night.

Yet at the same time, US media was dominated by concerns about Biden’s health and fitness for the presidency, and while his speech was delivered forcefully enough, a lengthy struggle to tie a sash bearing the presidential medal of freedom on to the outgoing Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, was a graphic reminder of the problem.

In the same speech, Biden announced that Ukraine would receive four new Patriot missile defence systems. However, the reality is that Ukraine has been asking publicly for extra air defence since April – a need tragically underlined on Monday when 44 were killed in attacks by Moscow, including the strike on a children’s hospital in Kyiv.

A day later, Denmark, the Netherlands and the US declared that the first of about 85 F-16 fighters were in the process of being transferred to Ukraine – more than 18 months after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, began pressing for them.

Few believe F-16s, as they arrive, can be a gamechanger in isolation – and though the hope is they can suppress attacks from air-launched glide bombs, they may at first be used to pick off Russian drones as they fly over Ukrainian airspace, a necessary but relatively basic task.

Ukraine has received weapon systems from the west that nobody would have thought possible immediately after Russia first launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, but the political fanfare that greets each new arrival has so far been followed by relative disappointment on the battlefield.

That risks reinforcing the idea that no amount of military aid can help Kyiv recover its lost territories and somehow win the war, though it misses the more important argument that without US military aid, Ukraine risks starting to lose.

When fresh US aid was withheld by Trump allies in Congress for months in the spring, Ukraine first lost Avdiivka in February, then border territory near Kharkiv in May, before sufficient supplies started coming through.

Nato allies in Washington did agree some positive diplomatic language on Ukraine’s eventual membership, describing the country as on an “irreversible path” to joining in the summit communique. Artful though this was, however, in practical terms Kyiv is no nearer joining, and the reality is that Russia’s invasion is now preventing Ukraine becoming a member, because Nato does not want to join in the war.

A key tactic of the Biden White House has been to link concerns about China, one of the few bipartisan issues in the US, with Nato, traditionally focused on the Euro-Atlantic. That all 32 allies could agree on describing China’s discreet supply of military components and chemicals to Russia as a “decisive enabler” of the war in Ukraine was a success from the point of alliance unity, Von Hippel said.

Such statements are unlikely to persuade Beijing to change its mind – “This is a hard nut to crack,” Von Hippel said – but anything that puts off China from supplying weapons to Russia can be defined as a success for the west. Depending on the results of the US election, come the next summit in The Hague, a year from now, such moments of diplomatic unity may prove harder to coordinate.

The US has stepped up efforts to target violent Israeli settlers, adding new individuals and organisations to a growing sanctions list and warning banks to check transactions linked to all Israeli “outposts” in the occupied West Bank.

The new sanctions cover the far-right group Lehava, already listed by the UK, and two founding members of Tsav9, a campaign group that blocked aid from reaching Gaza. The new measures also target outposts, suggesting the Biden administration is prepared to take at least some steps to confront Israel’s creeping land grab on the West Bank.

One of the outposts targeted was set up by a regional council, implying that branches of the Israeli state are potentially no longer off limits, when it comes to sanctions.

“It appears that they’ve not just targeted extremist settlers but have introduced a linkage to territoriality by citing illegal outposts,” Aaron David Miller, a former state department Middle East negotiator now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“It doesn’t take much imagination to conclude that the next target would be [Israeli] government financing for illegal outposts. And that would be a new departure to be sure.”

The G7 foreign ministers joined the UN and EU on Thursday in condemning the Israeli government’s decision last month to legalize five outposts in the West Bank, labelling the plan “inconsistent with international law”. The G7 statement comes at a time of rising concern that Israel’s rightist government is steadily moving towards annexation of the West Bank.

Matthew Miller, the state department spokesperson, said that the four West Bank outposts specifically targeted by Thursday’s sanctions, “are owned or controlled by US-designated individuals who have weaponized them as bases for violent actions to displace Palestinians”.

“Outposts like these have been used to disrupt grazing lands, limit access to wells, and launch violent attacks against neighboring Palestinians,” Miller said.

In a written statement, Miller reflected growing frustration in the Biden administration at the failure of the Israeli government to take its own measures against violent West Bank settlers, and warned that further US punitive measures could be in the pipeline.

“We strongly encourage the Government of Israel to take immediate steps to hold these individuals and entities accountable,” he said. “In the absence of such steps, we will continue to impose our own accountability measures.”

Potentially the most consequential element in the new US measures is the updated red flag alert from America’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen). It raises the risks of punitive fines for banks dealing with West Bank settlements.

The alert warns financial institutions about potential “suspicious activity”, that could indicate a sanctioned individual or organisation is trying to bypass controls. This now includes “payments involving entities, individuals, addresses on accounts, receiving addresses, or IP addresses linked to any West Bank ‘outpost’,” the warning says.

Human Rights Watch, who have long campaigned to highlight settler violence on the West Bank, welcomed the US measures as being the most far-reaching on the issue to date, but called for direct action against the Israeli government for its support for the extremists.

“In this case we’re pleased that the Biden administration is going farther than before with the alert,” Sarah Yager, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, said. “Now it’s time for sanctions against the Israeli authorities that are approving and inciting. We want to see the US, UK, Canada and others focus on power behind all this in the West Bank.”

All settlements in the occupied West Bank are considered illegal under international law. Outposts are settlements considered illegal even under Israeli law. There are nearly 200 all across the West Bank, according to the activist group Peace Now.

Many of the small outposts have close links to over 140 larger settlements recognised by the Israeli state though deemed illegal under international law. The broad language used in the FinCEN alert could mean financial transactions with all West Bank settlements could be affected.

Richard Nephew, a former state department coordinator on global anti-corruption in the Biden administration, said the financial crimes alert combined with the newly announced sanctions and the G7 declaration “create a pretty toxic environment”.

“That is the goal,” Nephew, author of The Art of Sanctions and now a senior research scholar at Columbia University, said. “The goal is to make it so that financial institutions, companies and others say: ‘This just isn’t worth it’, because the risks of actually falling into a sanctions problem or to a compliance problem, if you’re a US entity, is just simply too great.”

Additional reporting by Quique Kierszenbaum in Jerusalem

People in Gaza City are trapped in houses and bodies lie uncollected in the streets, Palestinian officials and emergency responders have said, a day after the Israeli army told residents to use two “safe routes” to leave the city and head south.

According to a Reuters report, the Gaza health ministry said it had heard about people trapped and others killed inside their houses in the Tel Al Hawa and Sabra districts of Gaza City. Rescuers could not reach them, the ministry said.

The civil emergency service said it estimated that at least 30 people had been killed in the Tel Al-Hawa and Rimal areas and it could not recover bodies from the streets there.

On Wednesday, the Israeli army dropped leaflets warning “everyone in Gaza City” – the focus of a heavy Israeli assault this week – that it would “remain a dangerous combat zone”. The leaflets urged residents to flee, and set out designated escape routes from the area where the UN humanitarian office said up to 350,000 people had been sheltering.

The UN said the latest evacuations “will only fuel mass suffering for Palestinian families, many of whom have been displaced many times”, and who face “critical levels of need”.

Many civilians told the Guardian they have concluded that there was no refuge in war-stricken Gaza and that they lacked confidence in the safe corridors set by Israel. Residents said they also feared that if they left they would not be able to take belongings or return.

“We will die but not leave to the south. We have tolerated starvation and bombs for nine months and we are ready to die as martyrs here,” Mohammad Ali, 30, told Reuters in a text message.

Hamas said the heavy Israeli assault on Gaza City this week could wreck efforts to finally end the war just as negotiations have entered the home stretch. In a statement, the Palestinian Islamist militant group said mediators had yet to provide it with updates on the state of the talks since it made concessions last week in response to a US-backed Israeli peace offer.

“The occupation continues its policy of stalling to buy time to foil this round of negotiations, as it has done in previous rounds,” the statement said.

The White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, said the US was “cautiously optimistic” about talks taking place in Egypt and Qatar.

“There are still gaps remaining between the two sides,” Kirby told the CNN. “We believe those gaps can be narrowed, and that’s what US Middle East envoy Brett McGurk and CIA director Bill Burns are trying to do right now.’’

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who faces opposition from within his coalition government to any deal that would halt the war without Hamas being vanquished, has said a deal must allow Israel to resume fighting until it meets all its objectives.

Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.

A US announcement of a plan to station long-range missiles in Germany for the first time since the cold war has set off a diplomatic furore between Washington and Moscow and elicited comparisons to the European missile crises of the 1980s.

Russian and US officials both accused each other of provoking the escalation on Thursday, as arms control experts warned that the deployments of missiles on the European continent, after the collapse of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, could fuel a new arms race.

The decision to station non-nuclear Tomahawk cruise, SM-6 and hypersonic missiles in Germany from 2026 was welcomed by Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who said it “fitted exactly” into his government’s security strategy, even as the move attracted fierce criticism amid fears it would make Germany more vulnerable to attack.

Scholz said the decision had been long in the making and would come as “no surprise” to anyone who was knowledgable about security and peace policies.

But Moscow did not see it that way. Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, issued a stark warning to Berlin, insisting Moscow would respond militarily to the decision, which he said aimed to impair Russian security and could not go unanswered.

He said that Nato was now “fully involved in the conflict” and called the move “just another link in the chain of a course of escalation”.

Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for the Russian government, called the planned move “a very serious threat” to Russia, which would be closely analysed by Moscow, which would “take thoughtful, coordinated and effective measures to contain Nato”.

The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, shot back: “What we are deploying to Germany is a defensive capability. Like many other defensive capabilities we’ve deployed across the alliance across the decades.

“More Russian sabre-rattling is not going to deter us from doing what we think is necessary to keep the alliance as strong as possible.”

Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, wrote: “First Russia develops/fields an INF missile in violation of treaty. Then US withdraws from treaty and deploys INF missiles as well. Then Russia will respond by deploying more INF missiles. Then … Does anyone have a plan here or is everyone on autopilot?”

Support for the move in Germany – which will see Tomahawk cruise missiles, which are fireable from ships or submarines, SM-6 and hypersonic weapons stationed on German soil from 2026, as agreed at the Nato conference in Washington this week – was measured, with some welcoming it and others warning it would endanger German security.

Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said that to be taken seriously Germany needed to flesh out a longer-term vision that was not dependent on the US, arguing that the agreement was too temporary, even if in line with Nato’s attempts to protect Ukraine and deter Russia. Germany he said, needed a longer-term plan for investment in “appropriate long-range defence systems”, to protect itself and Europe.

Pistorius is pushing for an increase of several billion euros to his defence budget. This week he called the amount of €58bn promised to him inadequate. “Everything we fail to invest in deterrence and defence capabilities now will come back to haunt us in future years,” he told the German radio station DLF on Thursday.

The cruise missile agreement has met stiff opposition from many politicians in Germany, while some members of Scholz’s three-way government have called for more clarity over it.

Critics have argued it is a hugely backward step in attempts to reduce the world’s nuclear arsenals. Ground-based missiles with a range beyond 500km were forbidden until 2019 under the INF treaty between Moscow and Washington in 1987.

The German opposition politician Sahra Wagenknecht, of the newly founded far-left party BSW, said that the stationing of attack missiles on German soil would not increase the country’s security but rather “increase the risk that Germany itself will become a theatre of war, with terrible consequences for everyone living here”.

Dietmar Bartsch, defence spokesperson for the leftwing Die Linke party, warned of a new armaments war. “I find this decision highly problematic, because the spiral in military buildup is being turned further under the headline ‘deterrence’,” he said.

The far-right populist AfD leader, Tino Chrupalla, said the shift in policy could turn Germany into a target for Russia, criticising Scholz for “letting Germany’s relationship with Russia be permanently damaged”.

He praised Hungary’s president, Viktor Orbán – who recently visited Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, in an attempt, according to Orbán, to forge a peace agreement between Moscow and Kyiv – saying Scholz could learn from him.

“Orbán … showed at the Nato summit how sovereign peace policy works in Europe. He wants to prevent his country from being drawn into the US conflict with Russia,” Chrupalla said.

Meanwhile, the Green party, part of Scholz’s government, demanded answers from him about details of the plan, including how it would be financed.

Sara Nanni, a spokesperson for the party’s parliamentary group, told the Rheinische Post she found it irritating that Scholz had yet to provide such details, “even though a clear classification” was “urgently needed”.

Support for Scholz came in particular from the main opposition Christian Democrats, whose foreign policy spokesperson, Jürgen Hardt, said the stationing of Tomahawks in Germany was a service to German security.

Joachim Krause, a political scientist and international policy expert, told DLF the presence of the cruise missiles would act as an effective deterrent, which could “considerably increase the military balance in favour of Nato”.

In case of an attack by Russia, Krausesaid, the weapons would also have the capability of penetrating deep into Russian territory. The planned stationing of hypersonic missiles in Germany would have a similar effect in sending the right message to Moscow, he suggested.

US intelligence services have foiled a Russian plot to assassinate the chief executive of Germany’s leading arms manufacturer, which was an apparent attempt at retaliation over the company’s role in providing a large amount of armaments for Ukraine, according to reports on Thursday.

The plot to murder Armin Papperger, the CEO of Rheinmetall, was one of several Russian government plans to kill defence industry executives in several countries in Europe who have been supporting Ukraine’s war effort, unidentified US and western officials told CNN.

The plans to kill Papperger were in the most advanced stages of any of the plots, the investigators reportedly said.

US authorities had immediately informed their German counterparts, according to the report, and security around Papperger and Rheinmetall had been stepped up accordingly.

Papperger told the Financial Times that the German government had set up a “great level of security around my person”.

While he did not directly confirm the threats, he told the Financial Times that the CNN report was credible, saying, “I think CNN is not just looking up at the sky”.

Rheinmetall has declined to comment but said in a statement to media that “necessary measures are always taken” in regular consultation with security authorities.

German authorities have yet to respond to requests for comment but a government official confirmed that the US had warned Berlin about the plot.

Rheinmetall is one of the world’s biggest armaments’ producers, making artillery and tank shells as well as armoured vehicles. It considerably ramped up its production after Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and is one of the largest suppliers of military equipment and ammunition to Ukraine, Germany’s Der Spiegel reports.

In February, Rheinmetall announced plans to open an ammunition factory in Ukraine to produce and repair armoured vehicles. The factory was the main reason for the plot against Papperger, German security authorities told Der Spiegel.

Observers noted that a patrol car and several police officers carrying submachine guns had been parked in front of the Rheinmetall headquarters in the western German city of Düsseldorf every day for months, while Papperger has had visible personal protection for a similar time period.

In public settings such as football matches, cultural events and association meetings, he has been accompanied by security provided by the police from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia – one of only a handful of people to be afforded such protection.

The white-haired, stockily built CEO has even appeared, during a visit to Ukraine, donning a bulletproof vest, declaring: “It is very important for us to support Ukraine efficiently and reliably,” Der Spiegel reports.

In the Spring, he took Olaf Scholz on a tour of a Rheinmetall production hall full of Leopard battle tanks.

Papperger’s profile has been boosted by Rheinmetall’s role in the conflict, with the company becoming one of the 40 largest companies listed in the DAX index as a result, according to Der Spiegel. Last year, its operating result shot up to almost €1bn, and the order books expanded by about 44 % to more than €38bn.

Rheinmetall has been described since the Russian full-blown invasion and Germany’s subsequent involvement as one of the biggest suppliers of weapons to Kyiv and a thorn in Moscow’s side.

In their piece they state that the Rheinmetall boss “had long been considered a threat by the German security authorities”. They suspected that because of his prominent position he was in danger of becoming the target of a Russian attack. The main reason given was that the company was building a factory for the Lynx infantry fighting vehicle in Ukraine and wanted to develop the arms industry in the country.

Rheinmetall is one of the largest single suppliers of military equipment and ammunition to Ukraine and wants to expand its production so that it is able to produce 700,000 rounds of artillery ammunition annually. Though 1 million is considered an approximate requirement for Ukraine to be able to adequately defend itself against Russia.

The Ukrainian army is equipped with a range of weapons from the German manufacturer, including Leopard 1 main battle tanks and Marder infantry fighting vehicles. In addition the company has supplied Ukraine with 155mm artillery shells, which have been central to Ukraine’s unrelenting war of attrition, and provided a comprehensive service involving repair, delivery and replacement parts.

The company says it has long been the target of so-called hybrid warfare from Russia, including cyber-attacks. The latest threats are being taken very seriously, and are considered plausible, a company insider told Der Spiegel, adding, “We will not let this divert ourselves from the decisive action to support Ukraine”.

The assassination plot revelations come amid a flurry of incidents believed to be part of a systematic Russian sabotage campaign in revenge for support for Ukraine. It has reportedly recruited amateurs locally to carry out everything from arson attacks on warehouses and shopping centres to smaller actions, including acts of vandalism and graffiti, as well as espionage operations, all intended to undermine Ukraine’s war effort and to help dent public support for Ukraine. The actions have been described as a “shadow war” that Moscow is waging in western Europe.

On Thursday a senior Nato official told reporters attending the alliance’s conference in Washington that the sabotage campaign had been increasing in intensity and had to be taken extremely seriously.

“We’re seeing sabotage, we’re seeing assassination plots, we’re seeing arson. We’re seeing things that have cost in human lives,” he said. “I believe very much that we’re seeing a campaign of covert sabotage activities from Russia that have strategic consequences.”

The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said at the Nato summit that Russia was waging a hybrid war of aggression, including cyber-attacks and sabotage of infrastructure. “This underlines once again that we as Europeans must protect ourselves as best we can and not be naive,” she told Reuters.

Two Australians have been found dead at a luxury hotel in the Philippines alongside the body of a Filipina.

The bodies were discovered with their hands and feet tied in a room at the Lake Hotel in Tagaytay, a resort city south of the nation’s capital.

The victims have been named in media reports as David James Fisk, 57, his wife, Lucita Barquin Cortez, 55, a Philippine-born Australian citizen, and a younger relative of Cortez.

Tagaytay’s police chief, Charles Daven Capagcuan, said the motive for the killings was not known and some valuables, including the victims’ phones, had not been taken.

Investigators were interviewing witnesses and examining security cameras.

Footage showed a man wearing a mask and a hoodie and carrying a sling bag walking out of the victims’ room a few hours before their bodies were discovered, Capagcuan said.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs also did not reveal the Australians identities but confirmed it was providing consular assistance to their families.

“We send our condolences to the families at this difficult time,” a spokesperson said.

Tagaytay’s mayor, Abraham Tolentino, said he was shocked by the discovery and apologised to the victims’ families.

“We’re very sorry to our Australian friends,” he said. “We will resolve this as soon as possible.”

The couple had flown from Sydney to Bali for a holiday then went to the Philippines on Monday to visit her two children, and decided to take a short break in Tagaytay before returning to Australia, a relative of the woman said.

The remains of Fisk would be flown back to Sydney and the two women would be buried in the Philippines, Tolentino said.

– with Associated Press

Brazil’s intelligence agency was illegally weaponised during Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right administration to monitor and harass some of the country’s most important politicians, journalists, judges and environmental officials, federal police have alleged.

Five people were arrested on Thursday as part of a long-running investigation into suspicions that during Bolsonaro’s 2019-22 government the Agência Brasileira de Inteligência (Abin) was used to spy on the president’s political foes.

According to a 187-page police document, the targets included some of Brazil’s best-known public figures and politicians from across the political spectrum.

Those targeted allegedly include: the head of Brazil’s lower house, Arthur Lira, and his predecessor, Rodrigo Maia; prominent allies of the current leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, including the senator, Randolfe Rodrigues; conservative figures including the former governor of São Paulo state, João Doria; four supreme court judges; two prominent political journalists, Vera Magalhães and Mônica Bergamo; and two senior officials from the environmental protection agency, Ibama, Hugo Loss and Roberto Cabral.

Federal police claimed that under the watch of Bolsonaro’s spy chief, Alexandre Ramagem, a “criminal organisation of high offensive capability” was set up within Abin.

That “parallel” intelligence agency allegedly used a series of clandestine techniques to gather information about people or groups considered adversaries or irritants. The fruits of that illegal work were allegedly transformed into online disinformation designed to hurt the reputations of the organisation’s targets and Brazil’s democratic institutions. Members of the covert unit are also accused of targeting Internal Revenue Service officials who were investigating suspicions of corruption involving president Bolsonaro’s senator son, Flávio Bolsonaro.

A screenshot of a 2020 WhatsApp message sent by one arrested suspect shows the alleged head of the secret group telling a colleague: “We need to find dirt” [on a target].

Another message, from 2022, shows a police officer sending an alleged member of the group information about three environmental protection officials deemed to be “causing trouble for the administration”.

In a third, even more shocking exchange, the suspect and a military official rage against supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes, who was credited with helping stave off a rightwing campaign to overthrow Brazil’s democratic system that culminated in the January 2023 attacks in Brasília.

“This is getting fucked up. This baldy is asking for a little extra,” one of them writes. “Just 7.62,” the other replies – an apparent reference to the 7.62mm rifle used by Brazil’s armed forces. The first person replies in English: “Head shot.”

Those named by police as targets reacted with anger and shock.

Rodrigo Maia condemned what he called “the behaviour of a totalitarian and criminal government, typical of the worst of dictatorships”.

Randolfe Rodrigues, who was the vice-president of a congressional inquiry into the Bolsonaro administration’s highly controversial handling of a Covid outbreak which claimed more than 700,000 lives, called the revelations “tragic”.

“While Brazilians were dying, the previous government – instead of using its time to buy vaccines – used its time to persecute and monitor the regime’s political adversaries,” he told reporters.

Another target, senator Renan Calheiros, lamented the intelligence agency’s “criminal capture” and the use of “Gestapo methods”.

Flávio Bolsonaro denied any knowledge of the alleged scheme. “Quite simply I had no relationship with Abin,” he tweeted, claiming the accusations were an attempt to scupper former spy chief Ramagem’s Bolsonaro-backed campaign to become Rio’s next mayor. Ramagem has yet to comment on Thursday’s police claims but has previously denied being responsible for an illegal spying scheme during his time at Abin.

Brazil’s intelligence agency was illegally weaponised during Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right administration to monitor and harass some of the country’s most important politicians, journalists, judges and environmental officials, federal police have alleged.

Five people were arrested on Thursday as part of a long-running investigation into suspicions that during Bolsonaro’s 2019-22 government the Agência Brasileira de Inteligência (Abin) was used to spy on the president’s political foes.

According to a 187-page police document, the targets included some of Brazil’s best-known public figures and politicians from across the political spectrum.

Those targeted allegedly include: the head of Brazil’s lower house, Arthur Lira, and his predecessor, Rodrigo Maia; prominent allies of the current leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, including the senator, Randolfe Rodrigues; conservative figures including the former governor of São Paulo state, João Doria; four supreme court judges; two prominent political journalists, Vera Magalhães and Mônica Bergamo; and two senior officials from the environmental protection agency, Ibama, Hugo Loss and Roberto Cabral.

Federal police claimed that under the watch of Bolsonaro’s spy chief, Alexandre Ramagem, a “criminal organisation of high offensive capability” was set up within Abin.

That “parallel” intelligence agency allegedly used a series of clandestine techniques to gather information about people or groups considered adversaries or irritants. The fruits of that illegal work were allegedly transformed into online disinformation designed to hurt the reputations of the organisation’s targets and Brazil’s democratic institutions. Members of the covert unit are also accused of targeting Internal Revenue Service officials who were investigating suspicions of corruption involving president Bolsonaro’s senator son, Flávio Bolsonaro.

A screenshot of a 2020 WhatsApp message sent by one arrested suspect shows the alleged head of the secret group telling a colleague: “We need to find dirt” [on a target].

Another message, from 2022, shows a police officer sending an alleged member of the group information about three environmental protection officials deemed to be “causing trouble for the administration”.

In a third, even more shocking exchange, the suspect and a military official rage against supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes, who was credited with helping stave off a rightwing campaign to overthrow Brazil’s democratic system that culminated in the January 2023 attacks in Brasília.

“This is getting fucked up. This baldy is asking for a little extra,” one of them writes. “Just 7.62,” the other replies – an apparent reference to the 7.62mm rifle used by Brazil’s armed forces. The first person replies in English: “Head shot.”

Those named by police as targets reacted with anger and shock.

Rodrigo Maia condemned what he called “the behaviour of a totalitarian and criminal government, typical of the worst of dictatorships”.

Randolfe Rodrigues, who was the vice-president of a congressional inquiry into the Bolsonaro administration’s highly controversial handling of a Covid outbreak which claimed more than 700,000 lives, called the revelations “tragic”.

“While Brazilians were dying, the previous government – instead of using its time to buy vaccines – used its time to persecute and monitor the regime’s political adversaries,” he told reporters.

Another target, senator Renan Calheiros, lamented the intelligence agency’s “criminal capture” and the use of “Gestapo methods”.

Flávio Bolsonaro denied any knowledge of the alleged scheme. “Quite simply I had no relationship with Abin,” he tweeted, claiming the accusations were an attempt to scupper former spy chief Ramagem’s Bolsonaro-backed campaign to become Rio’s next mayor. Ramagem has yet to comment on Thursday’s police claims but has previously denied being responsible for an illegal spying scheme during his time at Abin.

California’s wildfire season is off to a ferocious start, with the state’s top wildfire official saying that fires have already burned through five times the average amount of land for this time of year.

Speaking at a news conference on Wednesday, Joe Tyler, the director of the California department of forestry and fire protection (Cal Fire), said the state has responded to more than 3,500 wildfires so far this year. Together, those fires have scorched nearly 220,000 acres – more than five times above what is typical for mid-July, which is considered fairly early in the state’s wildfire season.

“We are not just in a fire season, we are in a fire year,” Tyler said at the news conference. “Our winds and the recent heatwave have exacerbated the issue, consuming thousands of acres. So we need to be extra cautious.”

Authorities across the US west have warned of the rising risk of wildfires amid a protracted heatwave that has dried out the landscape and smashed temperatures records from California to Oregon to Nevada.

“Climate change is real,” said California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, on Wednesday. “Those extremes are here present every day in the great state of California.”

An abundantly wet winter has left landscapes across California coated in grasses that quickly dried as the weather warmed, creating abundant fuel for fast-burning brush fires.

California crews were working in scorching temperatures to battle numerous wildfires on Thursday, including a stubborn 34,000-acre blaze known as the Lake fire, which prompted evacuation orders for about 200 homes in the mountains of Santa Barbara county, north-west of Los Angeles.

In Oregon on Thursday, crews were battling the Larch Creek fire, which has grown to more than 11,000 acres since Tuesday. Lower temperatures and calming winds were helping the crews’ efforts, but the local fire danger level remained extreme. One firefighter was treated for heat-related injuries.

In Hawaii, Haleakala national park on Maui was closed as firefighters battled a blaze on the slopes of a mountain. Visitors in more than 150 vehicles that had gone up on Wednesday for the famous sunset views were not able to descend until about 4am on Thursday because the narrow roads were blocked by fire crews.

More than 63 million people in the US remained under heat alerts on Thursday, as forecasters predicted some relief from the heat was due by the weekend.

Las Vegas set a new record on Wednesday when it saw its record fifth consecutive day of temperatures sizzling at 115F (46.1C) or greater. Already, Nevada’s largest city has broken 16 heat records since 1 June “and we’re not even halfway through July yet”, a National Weather Service meteorologist, Morgan Stessman, said on Wednesday.

That includes an all-time high of 120F set on Sunday, which beat the previous 117F record.

The heat has been suspected in deaths across multiple states. In California, officials in the Silicon Valley county of Santa Clara are investigating 19 potential heat-related deaths, including three homeless individuals, the county’s medical examiner-coroner’s office said in a statement on Thursday. And in Oregon, the number of potentially heat-related deaths has risen to 10, according to the state medical examiner’s office.

Heat was blamed for a motorcyclist’s death last weekend in Death Valley national park and the National Park Service is investigating the third death of a Grand Canyon hiker in recent weeks. Arizona authorities are investigating deaths of a two-year-old and a baby in separate incidents, and in Nebraska, Omaha police say a boy died after being left in an SUV.

Read more on wildfires and heat in the US

• Las Vegas sets record for number of days over 115F amid its ‘most extreme heatwave in history’
  ‘Like an oven’: death at US women’s prison amid heatwave sparks cries for help

• US wildfire season has arrived. Here’s why it could be an explosive summer

Donald Trump’s running mate will be introduced at the Republican national convention next Wednesday by his eldest son, according to people familiar with the matter, raising speculation that Senator JD Vance will be named the vice-presidential pick after being endorsed by Don Jr.

The fact that Don Jr will speak immediately before the running mate delivers remarks, earlier reported by Axios, is seen as notable inside the Trump campaign because of Don Jr’s close ties to Vance.

Still, a person directly familiar with the matter cautioned that the speaking schedule was decided three to four weeks ago and they were uncertain how instructive Don Jr’s involvement was.

Trump has said he wants his running mate to be revealed at the convention next week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but due to convention rules that require the ticket to be nominated by the first day, the former president has been forced to make a decision before Wednesday.

For months, Trump has presided over a characteristically theatrical selection process in which he made dramatic pronouncements at rallies in an effort to drive media speculation before narrowing the list to a final three: the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, Senator Marco Rubio and Vance.

The leading contenders have run through an emotionally draining fight to be Trump’s running mate, defending the former president in cable news interviews, mingling with members at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, coalescing support from Trump allies and trying to appeal to Trump’s core Maga voters at rallies.

The Guardian has previously reported that Trump has told allies he wants a running mate who would be a “fighter” – someone who is media-savvy and will defend him on adversarial TV networks – and loyal to the extent that they would be “everything Mike Pence wasn’t”.

Trump’s former vice-president was a valuable asset during the 2016 and 2020 campaigns because of his Christian conservative credentials that shored up support among Republicans who were suspicious of the thrice-married reality TV star.

But Pence’s refusal to do one final favor and comply with Trump’s demand to block the certification of the 2020 election results in Congress led to a falling-out, and made Pence the target of the January 6 Capitol attack rioters.

For his 2024 campaign, Trump is seeking a “Goldilocks” running mate: strong but loyal, in tune with Maga but not over-rehearsed, telegenic but not likely to outshine him. His choice will go up against Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to serve as vice-president.

Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, has increasingly fit that profile.

On Sunday, Vance said on NBC’s Meet the Press that he supported Trump’s vow to appoint a special counsel to prosecute Joe Biden, making apparent references to the House oversight committee’s search for evidence of impeachable conduct by Biden, which it has not found.

Vance also suggested it was reasonable for Trump to prosecute Biden on the grounds that Biden had supposedly weaponized the legal system against him, although there is no evidence Biden has been involved in prosecutorial decisions at the justice department or elsewhere.

The NBC anchor Kristen Welker pressed Vance on his support for a special counsel: “If it’s not OK for Joe Biden to weaponize the justice department – as you say, which there’s no evidence of that – why is it OK for Donald Trump to do that?” she asked.

Vance repeated the common complaint among Republicans that one former justice department official took a job as a prosecutor in the New York criminal case in which Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to influence the 2016 election with a hush-money scheme.

“If Donald Trump’s attorney general had his No 2 or his No 3 jump ship to a local prosecutor’s office in Ohio or Wisconsin, and that person then went after Donald Trump’s political opposition, that’s a different conversation,” he said, though the prosecutor at issue was not as senior as the hypothetical.

Trump has repeatedly vowed to prosecute his political enemies, sharing posts on his Truth Social website that advocated jailing top Democrats and Republicans who criticized him, including one that said the former House Republican Liz Cheney should face “televised military tribunals”.

A serial killer who preyed on Indigenous women in Canada will serve decades in prison after a judge determined he was criminally responsible for four “jarring and numbing” murders, in a verdict celebrated by family as “justice being served”.

Justice Glenn Joyal ruled on Thursday that Jeremy Skibicki was guilty of first-degree murder in the killings of Rebecca Contois, Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran and an unidentified woman, who was named Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe (Buffalo Woman) by Indigenous leaders. Joyal rejected an argument from the defence that Skibicki’s mental health had prevented him from understanding his actions.

Joyal said the “mercilessly graphic” nature of the case and Skibicki’s “purely expressed racist views” meant the killings had an “undeniable and profound impact” on the province of Manitoba, and laid bare the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.

The packed gallery in the Winnipeg courtroom erupted into cheers when the oral verdict was delivered.

“I just felt super happy. I wanted to cry,” Jorden Myran, Marcedes’s sister, told reporters after the verdict was read. “We fought for this for so long. He got what he deserved.”

On the eve of his trial, Skibicki admitted in May to killing the women. But his lawyers argued he should be found not criminally responsible for murders because he had schizophrenia at the time.

Prosecutors argued that Skibicki’s murders were racially motivated and that he deliberately targeted vulnerable women in the city’s shelter system.

The first-degree murder verdict means Skibicki will serve a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.

The murders were first uncovered in 2022, when the remains of Rebecca Contois, a member of Crane River First Nation, were found in a dumpster near Skibicki’s home. Police later found more remains in a city landfill.

During police interrogations, Skibicki admitted to killing Contois and the three other women, who were living in Winnipeg at the time. He cited white supremacist beliefs.

Dr Sohom Das, a forensic psychiatrist from the United Kingdom, testified for the defence, suggesting Skibicki suffered schizophrenia and was motivated by delusions, including a belief he was on a mission from God. But justice Joyal rejected Das’s conclusion and questioned the psychiatrist’s credibility.

Instead, he sided with Dr Gary Chaimowitz, the forensic psychiatrist who testified for the prosecution.

In graphic testimony, Chaimowitz told the court he believed Skibicki made up the alleged delusions, and was probably motivated by homicidal necrophilia.

Joyal told the court a full written decision, more than 150 pages long, would be released next week. The sentencing hearing for Skibicki will be held at a later date.

For families of the victims, the case has also been a grim reminder of government inaction: the remains of Harris and Myran are believed to be buried in the Prairie Green landfill, and police initially said they lacked the resources to search the privately owned facility, much of which is buried under tonnes of clay.

In March, Canada pledged tens of millions of dollars to search landfill for the remains of two Indigenous women, with work set to begin in the fall.

Donna Bartlett, Marcedes Myran’s grandmother, told reporters outside the court she was “happy” that Skibicki would serve a prison sentence.

“He got convicted of murder and I’m glad of that, I really am. Now the next step is to bring my girl home.”

Multiple Chinese military warships were spotted off the coast of Alaska over the weekend, the US Coast Guard announced.

In a statement released on Wednesday, the US Coast Guard said that it detected three vessels approximately 124 miles (200km) north of the Amchitka Pass in the Aleutian Islands, as well as another vessel approximately 84 miles (135km) north of the Amukta Pass, a strait between the Bering Sea and the north Pacific Ocean.

All four Chinese vessels were “transiting in international waters but still inside the US exclusive economic zone, which extends 200 nautical miles from the US shoreline”, according to the US Coast Guard.

“The Chinese naval presence operated in accordance with international rules and norms,” R Adm Megan Dean of the US Coast Guard said, adding: “We met presence with presence to ensure there were no disruptions to US interests in the maritime environment around Alaska.”

Responding to US Coast Guard radio communication, the Chinese vessels said their purpose was “freedom of navigation operations”.

“Coast guard cutter Kimball continued to monitor all ships until they transited south of the Aleutian Islands into the north Pacific Ocean. The Kimball continues to monitor activities in the US exclusive economic zone to ensure the safety of US vessels and international commerce in the area,” the US Coast Guard said.

Last August, the US dispatched four navy warships in addition to a reconnaissance airplane after multiple Chinese and Russian military vessels carried out a joint naval patrol near Alaska.

At the time, the flotilla, which experts said appeared to be the largest to approach US territory, was described as a “highly provocative” maneuver amid Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine as well as political tensions between the US and China over Taiwan.

In a tense cross-examination in Alec Baldwin’s involuntary manslaughter trial, the actor’s defense attorney suggested that New Mexico authorities were focused on pinning blame on the star rather than properly investigating what had led to the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

Alex Spiro, one of Baldwin’s defense attorneys, grilled the crime scene technician Marissa Poppell about a search police conducted on the prop house that provided the Colt .45 used in the shooting. He highlighted the fact that police had not collected surveillance footage from the site, pressed Poppell on precisely how thoroughly the facility was searched and alleged that law enforcement had withheld evidence from the defense.

“Isn’t the truth that you were just trying to get this over with so the prosecutors could focus on Alec Baldwin?” Spiro said in the Santa Fe courtroom on Thursday morning, which Poppell denied.

Spiro suggested that police have evidence that the live ammunition that made its way on to the set came from the prop supplier, rather than the film’s armorer, who prosecutors said brought the bullets on site during filming.

He questioned Poppell about a “good samaritan” who had come forward to police this year with a box of munitions that he claimed came from the prop supplier, Seth Kenney, and matched the ammunition that killed Hutchins. A report of the interview was not included with the other Rust evidence nor shared with the lawyer of Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armorer, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in March.

The special prosecutor Kari Morrissey cast doubt on the “good samaritan”, stating that the person who came forward was a friend of Gutierrez-Reed’s father. Gutierrez-Reed was expected to testify for the state on Friday, her lawyer told NBC News.

As the prosecution has sought to portray Baldwin as reckless in his handling of firearms, his team has focused on alleged missteps by the state, including FBI testing that permanently damaged the firearm before it could be examined by the defense and safety failings on set.

“There is zero evidence in this case that Alec Baldwin brought the live round on this set, correct?” Spiro asked Poppell. “There is zero evidence that Alec Baldwin loaded that round into the gun, correct?”

Testimony from Poppell revealed that live ammunition was found on bandoliers worn by Baldwin as well as the actor Jensen Ackles.

The closely watched trial got off to a slow start on Thursday and was delayed multiple times as Morrissey objected to Spiro’s questioning and the prosecution and defense disagreed about the admission of certain evidence.

The judge favored the prosecution in allowing the admission of part of a transcript showing Baldwin’s knowledge of the dangers of blank rounds, and a phone call with his wife made after the shooting in which the actor tells his family they should still come visit him in New Mexico.

On Wednesday, the jury viewed harrowing footage depicting the aftermath of the shooting and medics’ desperate efforts to treat cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

The scene at the Bonanza Creek Ranch where the actor and crew were filming the western Rust was captured via body-camera footage from a New Mexico sheriff’s deputy who responded to the incident and testified in court this week.

Videos from the set and a 911 call played in the courtroom provided a dramatic start to the long-anticipated trial, which comes almost three years after the October 2021 shooting. Hutchins was killed and the director, Joel Souza, was injured after a weapon that Baldwin was holding – that, unbeknown to anyone on set, contained live ammunition – fired a single bullet.

The incident, the first shooting death on a Hollywood set since 1993, sent shock waves through the industry and the trial is being closely followed by media outlets from around the world.

Baldwin has adamantly denied pulling the trigger. The gun’s manufacturer testified in court on Thursday that the firearm’s design meant it could not have fired without a pull of the trigger, but also said that he had not seen the weapon for several years before it was used on the Rust set and did not know what condition it was in.

Prosecutors said that evidence shows Baldwin not only pulled the trigger but that he violated “cardinal rules of firearm safety” while on set, repeatedly placing his finger on the hammer and trigger and pointing the gun at people while filming.

In opening statements and in testimony from witnesses, prosecutors sought to portray an unsafe workplace on a tight budget with a lead actor who acted recklessly and placed others in danger.

“That gun the defendant had asked to be assigned worked perfectly fine, as it was designed,” prosecutor Erlinda Johnson said. “He pointed the gun at another human being, cocked the gun and pulled that trigger in reckless disregard for Ms Hutchins’ safety.”

Baldwin’s defense team, however, cast the blame on the film’s armorer and first assistant director, who were responsible for checking the gun. Baldwin was focused on his job on set – acting – and the people who were supposed to ensure the safety of the weapon failed to do so, defense attorney Alex Spiro told the jury on Wednesday.

“The evidence will show that on a movie set, safety has to occur before the gun is placed in an actor’s hands,” he said.

Baldwin has long denied pulling the trigger, but even if he did so, Spiro said, he would not be guilty of a crime. “On a movie set you’re allowed to pull the trigger, so even if he intentionally pulled the trigger, as prosecutors said, that doesn’t mean he committed a homicide.”

The jury this week has heard from law enforcement officers who first responded to the incident as well as the crime scene technician Poppell.

Baldwin faces up to 18 months in prison if convicted.