Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Muncho and with me are Zuzana Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we will talk about Russia. The EU has posed sanctions over the weekend more dramatically than what we predicted.

Germany has responded with extraordinary measures more dramatically than we predicted.

The German Bundeswehr will see a massive increase in investment by about 15 billion euros a

year. That will bring German defense spending up close to the NATO defense spending target

of 2%. It will be used to repair

equipment that is not functional right now. So it initially be a repair job, but it will

ultimately strengthen the usability of the German army. This is a big shift, especially coming

from an SPD, Green government that had promised to move

Germany in the opposite direction. The EU has imposed sanctions on the central bank, and we're going to

talk about the central bank element of the sanctions later. But I want to ask you, Jack,

you wrote about the gas situation in Europe. What do you think? Is Putin going

to cut the gas? What are the considerations behind the politics of gas? So I think the consideration

here, right, is that, so to start off with, of course, as numerous

people, including ourselves, have pointed out, Russia's overall economy is not very big, right?

It's about the size of Spain's.

If you think about it in the round, Russia is not necessarily in a great position in that regard.

Energy is the major ace in the

whole when it comes to dealing with the European Union for Russia. It is the most significant

point of leverage. So there are considerations on both sides. In terms of on the EU side and NATO, I guess the

consideration is when we're doing all of this, do we want to be sending hundreds of millions

of euros worth of money basically to Russia to fund their invasion? That's one consideration on

...