Just to get a bit more detail into this, the germany-russia-thing is not really primarily based on cheap energy.

It's much, much deeper.

Don't forget, something like a third of germany was basically russia for half a century. The people in east germany were forced to learn russian, generally were culturally extremely close. And tons of pipelines and general trade relations were built during that time.

Additionally, a large share of the german populations are "(spät)aussiedler" - people from ex-soviet areas, culturally mostly russian, with german heritage.

They'd have been stupid to not utilize the connections back then. At least until crimea. I think that was the point when we should have started to shut it down completely - but sadly, merkel's cdu (merkel grew up in the east) wasn't having any of it.

Many of the current relations grew out of the east-german closeness. By far not all, west germany even received gas/oil during the cold war. But it got much more after 1989.

Does that excuse any of it, especially the support of russia after their annexation of crimea? Nope. I just think it's important to understand context and motivations, and a "cheap energy" just doesn't offer that.