Chancellor Olaf Scholz has stood firm on Germany’s resistance to an immediate embargo of Russian fossil fuels and warned it would trigger a recession, as economists slashed growth forecasts for Europe’s largest economy.

Scholz told the Bundestag on Wednesday that immediately cutting Russian energy imports would trigger an economic crisis. Other European states and the US are pushing for the EU to impose tougher sanctions on Russian energy, but Germany has resisted because more than half of the gas and coal that it imports comes from Russia as does a third of its oil.

“To do that from one day to the next would mean plunging our country and the whole of Europe into a recession,” the German chancellor warned ahead of meetings with other EU leaders and a G7 meeting with US president Joe Biden in Brussels this week. “Hundreds of thousands of jobs would be at risk,” he said. “Entire branches of industry are on the brink.”