Lots of reasons. It was at the time the least authoritarian regime. The alternatives are Saudi-Arabia, where as I understand the gas is harvested with the help of human rights violations, and other nearby suppliers like Norway were already and still are at capacity.
At the same time, gas is a relatively enviromentally safe, when compared to others, and since the relations to Russia were mostly friendly, the slight problems in the regime were ignored.
Now germany is reliant on them, and that was a mistake they are realizing. But if germany stops accepting gas today, the germans will freeze in the winter when the gas runs out, so its a complicated situation.
The issue is not people freezing. Wear a sweater and suck it up. Buy an electric heater. There are ways to hack your way through it.
The much larger problem is industrial manufacturing, in clusters like Ludwigshafen, where you have companies like BASF and Benckiser that rely on Russian gas for their refinery operations.
Fertilizers, chemicals, lubricants, etc.
You turn off Russian gas, you turn off the German industrial complex. Literally over night.
And that’s the reason why the German is so cagey about stopping the import of Russian gas. They can’t, because they don’t have an alternative.
At the same time, gas is a relatively enviromentally safe, when compared to others, and since the relations to Russia were mostly friendly, the slight problems in the regime were ignored.
Now germany is reliant on them, and that was a mistake they are realizing. But if germany stops accepting gas today, the germans will freeze in the winter when the gas runs out, so its a complicated situation.