The most important things for you on Thursday:

Patrick Schlereth

Editor on duty at FAZ.NET.

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1. More independent of Russia with liquid gas


2. The next open letter to Scholz


3. Celebrities turn away from Putin


4. Investigations into Baden-Württemberg's interior minister


5. Northern Ireland before the small revolution


6. With the slow train to Sylt


7. German final in the Europa League?

1. More independent from Russia with LPG

Today Minister of Economics Habeck lays the foundation stone for Germany's first liquid gas terminal.

Environmentalists criticize the hasty procedure.

The oil embargo against Russia could trigger bottlenecks.

Quick fix procedure:

In order to get out of the dependency on Russian gas supplies, things should now be done very quickly.

Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck (Greens) wants to lay the foundation stone for Germany's first liquid gas terminal in Wilhelmshaven today.

The energy company Uniper will operate the plant, and LPG imports are scheduled to start at the end of the year.

The capacity of the plant in Wilhelmshaven is nine billion cubic meters - a tenth of the total German gas requirements or a fifth of what previously came from Russia.

In total, the federal government is chartering four floating terminals – for almost three billion euros.

Concerns:

RWE is planning a terminal in Brunsbüttel, as further locations Stade, Hamburg-Moorburg and Eemshaven in the Netherlands are under discussion.

The infrastructure should later also be able to be used for green energy sources, because natural gas is only considered a temporary solution towards the non-fossil age.

Environmental protection associations are not enough, they fear an "environmental blind flight" in the "extremely sensitive ecosystems of the North Sea and Wadden Sea" if the environmental impact assessment is dropped.

bottlenecks?

The EU Commission proposed an oil embargo against Russia on Wednesday.

After initial hesitation, the federal government wants to support this step.

One question remains unanswered: What will happen to the PCK refinery in Schwedt, Brandenburg, which supplies large parts of the new federal states and the capital and is majority owned by the Russian company Rosneft?

According to Habeck, Schwedt could be filled from Danzig or Rostock - but Rosneft has no interest in Schwedt refining foreign oil.

"The federal government willingly accepts that the energy supply in Berlin and Brandenburg will be seriously endangered," warns left-wing MP Klaus Ernst, chairman of the energy committee in the Bundestag.

more on the subject

FAZ podcast for Germany: next level of escalation oil embargo - will eastern Germany be paralyzed now?

2. The next open letter to Scholz

In a new open letter, 57 celebrities call for supporting Ukraine with weapons.

You are turning against the appeal from the "Emma", whose co-author Reinhard Merkel comments in the FAZ interview.

Replica:

The open letter from the 28 celebrities around Alice Schwarzer, which rejects the delivery of heavy weapons to Ukraine, has been the subject of heated debate in recent days.

The 57 first signers of the second open letter take the opposite view: Only those who support Ukraine with weapons are able to counter the Russian will to annihilate.

Self-defense:

"In the hands of those attacked, tanks and howitzers are also defensive weapons because they serve self-defense," says the letter, which was published in the "Zeit" on Wednesday, among others.

If Putin's "armed revisionism in Ukraine succeeds," the danger increases "that the next war will take place on NATO territory." The letter was signed by former Green Party politician Ralf Fücks, the writers Daniel Kehlmann, Herta Müller and Maxim Biller, the publisher Mathias Döpfner and the historian Hedwig Richter.