Gulliver Foyle
Philosopher
The thing is, at the time everbody was doing it. The US was bending over backwards to excuse the atrocities Ruzzia committed in Chechenya and Georgia for example.In hindsight, yes. It now looks rather naive of Germany to hope that treating Russia like a regular country might get it used to behaving like one, and that doing a deal for natural gas would tend to make the seller and buyer dependent on each other so they wouldn't wish to screw up a mutually advantageous deal.
Mutual dependence worked to forge peace between Germany and France after 3 major wars in a century. It wasn't obviously nuts to think it could work again.