Because many European countries are quite dependent on Russia's natural gas and oil, the sanctions imposed on Russia by Western countries after the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War did not dare to spread to Russia's energy supply for a while. At the beginning of the sanctions, Russia's main currency, the ruble, did fall sharply, but after a series of Russian counterattacks, the ruble's exchange rate has risen back, and it is even higher than the pre-war exchange rate against the dollar.
In this case, Russian President Vladimir Putin has already said many times that Western countries must pay in rubles when they continue to buy Russian gas. However, the vast majority of Western countries do not agree to Russia's request at all, but now it seems that these Western countries are only hard-spoken.
Since it risked gas outages as long as it did not use rubles to pay for gas, Germany took the lead in compromising with Russia. According to the latest report of the Russian news agency, just a few days ago, Italian Prime Minister Draghi said at a press conference held during his visit to the United States that no one has said that using rubles to pay for natural gas is a violation of sanctions, which is a gray area.
Germany, Russia's largest importer of natural gas, has begun paying for gas in rubles, most importers have opened ruble accounts, and the Italian prime minister believes that gas payments to Russia will continue.
In fact, a day before the Italian prime minister's statement, German media reported that German gas giant VNG was planning to send euros to Gazprom and then further convert them into rubles to pay for natural gas. Many EU countries, led by Germany, had been clamoring to expand the supply of natural gas suppliers before the outbreak of the war, but the dependence on Russian gas was getting higher and higher, and this situation could not be eliminated in a short period of time.
If analyzed from another perspective, the reason why Germany chose to compromise with Russia is also for the purpose of saving its own manufacturing industry. It should be known that Germany is the world's second largest trade surplus country, is a very important exporter of industrial products, and most of the products exported by Germany are still very profitable industrial finished products, such as medical equipment and machine tools.
Since Trump took office in 2016, Americans have gradually felt the harm of the hollowing out of their own industries. Trump's trade war is largely about hoping that manufacturing will return to the United States, but his idea has proved to fail, because the mainland's powerful manufacturing industry has made many products into cabbage prices, and once these production lines return to the United States, the products produced will be uncompetitive and likely to bring uncontrollable inflation, which has been confirmed.
But the situation facing Germany is different. Because the profits of the German manufacturing industry are relatively high, it is possible to ensure a high quality of life for its own workers. However, once Germany encounters an energy crisis, it will directly affect the production costs and production capacity of Germany's local manufacturing industry. We know that Germany imports natural gas not only for heating, but also for a large part. After the Germans themselves completely abolished their nuclear and solar power industries, the significance of natural gas power generation became even more important. Once there is a huge gap in natural gas, it will in fact mean that there will be great problems in both industrial capacity and cost.
If the Germans did ban the import of Russian gas altogether because of the so-called international morality, it would be possible to fill the gap in a few years with natural gas from the United States or Norway, but then the cost would rise sharply. It should be known that the rise in the price of natural gas is the rise in the price of electricity, and finally it will be reflected in the rise in the export price of industrial products. As a result, the competitiveness of German industrial products is undoubtedly greatly reduced.
And the market is clearly not going to stop and wait for Germany's gas supply to resume. In recent years, germany's market share due to the vacated product capacity will most likely be divided by China and the United States and other countries, so that the German manufacturing industry will undoubtedly face a devastating blow.