Europe chose to deprioritize building natural gas capacity in the form of LNG ships and ports in favor of wind and solar. This order of priorities made them increasingly dependent on Russia's natural gas coming from two pipelines, Nord Stream 1 and 2.

So as many across the western world predicted, Russia used (and continues to use) that dependency as leverage to get leniency on their actions in Ukraine.

Natural gas will continue to be a critical bridge fuel to get to a world that is majority powered by renewables. Impossible to do without it.

Europe gambled Russia wouldn't do something like this and they lost. That loss caused the price of European nat gas to spike 2000% at one point and it's still up 800% today.