Putin’s war of aggression has shattered the German strategy of hope that economic interdependence can be the engine for a change of values in autocratic states. The fact that Germany continued to build the Nord Stream II Baltic Sea pipeline with little self-reflection and in opposition to its European neighbours and even its security guarantor, the US, is incomprehensible from today’s perspective. Despite the Crimean annexation as well as the war in eastern Ukraine, influence on European elections and targeted pinpricks by the Kremlin in the form of political assassinations, Germany continued down the dead-end road of energy dependency. Meanwhile, democratic change in Putin’s Russia had disappeared from the horizon of history, but cheap energy prices beckoned.