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EPA
When Vladimir Putin switched off the gas taps to Europe, Germany more than most feared a winter of blackouts. Ministers scrambled to secure alternative supplies, painfully aware that a heavy dependence on Russian gas had left this industrial nation woefully exposed.
But fast forward a few months and, as lights sparkle in the Christmas markets, there is a sense of tentative optimism in the Glühwein spiced air. Germany's hastily assembled strategy to manage without Russian gas appears - for now - to be working.
"Energy security for this winter is guaranteed," the Chancellor Olaf Scholz told MPs in the German parliament on Wednesday morning.
Not only are the country's gas stores full; the result, in part, of a frantic - and expensive - buying operation on the world's markets.
But, up on Germany's windswept North Sea coast, engineers have just finished building - in record time - the country's very first import terminal for liquified natural gas (LNG).