I would add this here - Russia, having previously delivered ultimatums a couple of times, and having received what it wanted, decided that they would continue to calmly achieve their goals by the method of threats, blackmail, ultimatums, and their fifth column in the EU (Merkel, Macron and many others) . They were sure that the EU, the USA, Britain would allow Ukraine to be swallowed up, once again closing their eyes or "expressing concern."
The sad thing is, nobody could stop them and they realized this long time ago. I mean what could the world do about it? The power of nuclear they have, and the willingness to use it if they are not given what they want to creates the biggest issue right now.What we are looking at right now is the fact that Russia could do whatever it wants, and if you do not do just sanctions, if you do something militarily, like send soldiers, then they will send nukes and that's it, there is no discussion after that and everyone is afraid of that. I do not think that Russia will stop here, they will do whatever they want to do, because nobody else could top them.
I don't know why this is an "amazing fact" for you. Let me explain - since the time of the Soviet Union (but I won’t insist here - I didn’t personally observe it), the USSR and then Russia invested huge amounts of money in bribing, collecting or forming compromising evidence on many European politicians. Remember the same Berlusconi, Schroeder, Merkel, today's presidents of Hungary and the Czech Republic, and many others with lower positions. This is all the "fifth column" of Russia. And they really perform all the commands of the Kremlin ghoul! The monopolization and dependence of the EU hydrocarbon market was built over the years and by the hands of well-known politicians. Uncomfortable politicians were removed, or problems were created for them through nationalist, far-right, and left-wing parties and groups, including terrorist ones. Do you want a fun challenge? Take an excel sheet and start filling in the columns with the following data: date, riots somewhere, and the third column - what events were taking place in or with Russia at that moment? After a couple of months, you will have a perfectly correlated sample of dependent events! The second interesting observation - have you ever noticed that international terrorist activity has a correlation with events around Russia? And as soon as there are real problems in Russia, such as the crisis of 1998, then suddenly all terrorist groups all over the world, except for very specific ones, suddenly subside. Here is such a funny statistic that is extremely easy to check
Well, let's get back to the essence of the matter - and so, all these "impossibility to break gas / oil / coal ties with Russia" - this is a completely manageable, well-protected process. Although we must pay tribute to the EU - recently there have been shifts. By the way - this sharply coincided with the departure from the post of "KGB Major Merkel"