I think that Merkel and the other "strong" German leaders are the reason we are at this point (no surprise though, a good amount of them are/were on the Kremlin

I think that Merkel and the other "strong" German leaders are the reason we are at this point (no surprise though, a good amount of them are/were on the Kremlin's payroll). All the energy related decisions in the past 20 years seems to have been made with the purpose to make Germany dependent on Russia (Nuclear, lack of LPG terminals, etc), and to make sure that countries included in the imperialistic ambitions of Moscow (like Ukraine) could affect influence this relationship (NS1, NS2)