In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, German lawmakers cautiously proposed ways to cut their country’s ties to Russian natural gas. The heads of some of Germany’s leading industrial companies, long reliant on Russian gas, wanted no part of it.
Martin Brudermüller, chief executive of the chemical maker BASF, one of Germany’s biggest corporations, warned in April that a cutoff of Russian energy “could send the German economy into its worst economic crisis since the end of World War II.”
