There was a frightfully insightful recent twitter thread making rounds, saying that extractive industries are perfect to be headed/owned by mob bosses, because the more complex the industry the more leverage the technical employees have. I.e. in extractive industries they have close to none, in manufacturing they have a solid measure of respect, while in tech industries they get to dictate the culture of the company.
Which means a mob leadership (we're not pretending anymore Russia doesn't have one of those, right?) will favor extractive industries over everything else, not just because they're much easier to own and exploit, but because allowing other types of companies to grow creates power centers outside of their control. They actively prefer to outsource services abroad, even if they are more expensive and create reliance on foreign partners.
Which means Germany's bet was wrong on two counts:
1. It propped exactly the kind of industries where the money goes in mob's pockets
2. It was unnecessary, because Russia was making itself incredibly vulnerable to sanctions all by itself by avoiding to develop anything more complex than a well or a mine (normally I'd say defense excluded, but seeing the quality of their current armed forces, it's more like an argument that even defense is included).
The natural question here is if the blunder is an honest mistake... but honest mistakes and motivated reasoning go suspiciously well together, and by all accounts the German elites more than occasionally gained from trade with Russia.