[Salon] Germany pledges big military aid package to Ukraine as Kyiv puts 2026 defense needs at $120 billion

FM: John Whitbeck

The ASSOCIATED PRESS report at the link transmitted below makes clear that, while the Trump administration now appears to maintain only a commercial interest in the perpetuation of the war in Ukraine, happy to sell weapons to other Western governments that may wish to give them to the Ukrainian government and to bully other countries into purchasing more expensive American oil and gas rather than Russian oil and gas, the primary Western force seeking to ensure the perpetuation of the war in Ukraine for non-commercial reasons is now the German government.

https://apnews.com/article/nato-ukraine-us-weapons-russia-war-ffcba0fbc060197f50a52110347472a3

Observers may legitimately wonder what primarily motivates and could explain or contribute to the intensity of the anti-Russian and anti-Palestinian policies of German governments, policies that are more intensely hostile to Russia and Palestine than those of virtually any other Western government.

Might the psychological roots of these policies have been planted in the 1940s?

Physical extermination of an indigestible people in a racially supremacist ethnostate was not the first choice of the Nazi regime, as it is not the first choice of the current Israeli regime, being resorted to only when expulsion was deemed impracticable, no other state or states being willing to take these people in.

While Germans may like to view their unconditional support for Israel and everything it chooses to do as virtuously making amends for past German sins, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, albeit initiated and achieved for its own reasons by the Third Reich's British enemy, can also be viewed as effectively constituting the final step in the ultimately successful achievement of the Hitlerian "final solution" to its perceived "Jewish problem" -- a Germany without Jews.

This could, at least partially, explain why all German governments since 1948 have officially deemed unconditional support for Israel, even when, as shown by recent polling, a majority of German citizens believe that Israel is following Germany's genocidal example, to be a staaträson (a fundamental German state obligation) which can never be questioned or qualified and why Germany continues to exercise an effective veto over any constructive European Union action toward some measure of justice for the Palestinian people, who played no role in the Holocaust but have been made to pay an excruciating price for Germany's sins.

It being clear from Russia's continuing failure even to completely occupy the four Russophone-majority oblasts which it formally annexed in September 2022 that Russia poses no conceivable threat to Germany (https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/02/27/has-the-world-gone-mad), it is difficult to explain the rabid Russophobia of Friedrich Merz and Ursula von der Leyen, including their apparently insatiable desire to perpetuate a war against Russia to the last Ukrainian, otherwise than by deep-rooted (if perhaps unconscious) resentment and a desire for revenge against the country primarily responsible for Germany's defeat and unconditional surrender in World War II.

While German psychology is complicated and not uniform and while other explanations are available, these potential explanations of Germany's prominent role in perpetuating both the brutal war in Ukraine and the brutal occupation of Palestine may be worthy of consideration by those who would prefer to end wars (https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/17/a-democratic-end-to-ukraines-war) and genocides (https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/27/two-solutions-for-the-question-of-palestine).