Germany, urged to ‘stop Putin’s war machine,’ resists Russian energy embargo

The professor, Rüdiger Bachmann, is a co-author of a paper published this month that’s galvanizing support for banning Russian energy imports. It’s one of several studies finding that such a move would harm the German economy but ultimately be manageable.

Those findings contrast with warnings from Scholz that an embargo would wreak havoc on the economy and risk social unrest. The chancellor voiced his displeasure with the experts in an interview with the broadcaster ARD, saying it was “irresponsible to add up mathematical models that then don’t work.”

“They get it wrong!” he exclaimed.

The standoff is at the heart of an intensifying debate in Germany over how quickly the country can wean itself off Russian oil and natural gas, and what sort of sacrifices the government should ask of the public.

Germany relies on Russia for about 55 percent of its natural gas and 35 percent of its oil. Proponents of a boycott say it’s essential to act quickly to deny Moscow financing for its war in Ukraine. Scholz, though, has insisted on a more incremental approach.

He has promised to disentangle his country’s energy system from Kremlin-aligned companies and, in a significant shift, scuttled the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline — a move the United States had urged for years. But the chancellor, a Social Democrat who leads a left-liberal coalition government, has ruled out an immediate embargo, claiming it would plunge Europe into recession and threaten “hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

“Russia is observing this discourse in Germany very closely,” said Janis Kluge, an expert on the Russian economy at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “Seeing statements about mass unemployment and GDP loss gives confidence to Russian leadership, gives them leverage and gives them the sense that they have a powerful tool on their hands.”

The United States — which last year received about 3.5 percent of its oil from Russia and none of its natural gas — moved earlier this month to ban oil imports from Russia and recently committed to routing more liquefied natural gas to its European allies. The European Union, in turn, has vowed to cut Russian gas imports by two-thirds by the end of this year and end the bloc’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels before the close of the decade. But even as Russian President Vladimir Putin continues his assault on Ukraine, the U.S. government has not been able to persuade the E.U. to join an embargo, which finds support in Poland and the three Baltic states while facing resistance from countries including Italy, Hungary and, above all, Germany.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has implored German leaders to see the issue in moral terms, rather than “through the prism of the economy.”

In the prime-time television interview, Scholz bristled not at an emotional appeal, but at the competing economic analysis.

To Bachmann, who studied in Germany and the United States and has been a professor of economics at Notre Dame since 2014, the rebuke from the chancellor — nicknamed the…