Germany seems to be another hindrance to defending Ukraine. They are willing to be subjected to economic blackmail via the Nordstream 2 pipeline, and are preventing military equipment from being sent via Germany to Ukraine.
And I'm not suprised about their actions at all. They already blocked Estonia from sending weapons to Ukraine. Offcourse, later they will impose "strict sanctions" and they will be deeply concenerned, but as we saw so many times already, sanctions don't work.
I would not be certain that Germany will follow through with sanctions. They are pushing through with the Nordstream 2 pipeline, which makes them dependent on Russia for energy. Germany is also spending well under what they promised to spend on defense and has been doing so for years.
Russia is doing what it wants. It took Crimea, made Belarus its puppet state, shot down a Malaysian passenger jet and blamed it on the Ukrainians, refused to give back Polish government plane that crashed in Smolensk, forced the US to cancel a deal with Poland that was supposed to place missile defense systems along its eastern border. Russian agents poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter, poisoned and then arrested Alexei Navalny. Putin and Lavrov often threaten other countries and lie in public. Russian elections are known to be a joke and in one of them there was so many fraudulent votes for Putin that the sum of votes shown on TV was over 100%.
I'm fairly certain that if they invade Ukraine, the UN, NATO and the EU will issue formal letters to Putin, maybe even call him, then do some reconnaissance flights, drop some aid packages, accept refugees and that's going to be it.
Putin is certainly a dictator, even if Russia has "elections".
Putin has taken his aggressive steps while there has been weak US presidents. It is no accident that Russia took steps to undermine US Presidents that would be willing to stand up to Putin, and took steps to elect weak US presidents (such as Obama and Biden).