If you take a look at ng prices you will see that the prices went up more than half a year before Russias invasion of Ukraine: https://www.macrotrends.net/3235/eu-natural-gas-prices The reason for this was because Gazprom stopped supplying the spot market and also bought storage capacity and kept it empty. All of that only made sense after the invasion to better blackmail Europe. It was their bad luck that China allowed them to attack only after the Olympics which took most of the force out of that blow. Anyway there was no sane way to continue this business relationship.