Look, I'm not on Russia's side here, it is crazy to suddenly invade another country like that. But I hate illogical arguments and propaganda even more, and this topic is full of it.

"It's very much in Russia's interest to shift blame away from themselves to sow dissent"

The argument you're making here about Putin playing 4D chess is totally illogical. It only sounds right to you because of years of nonsense from certain political quarters about social media bots, "sowing dissent" etc as a way to explain their domestic woes, not because it makes sense.

Russia's actual interest here is to trade gas for money + ending of general sanctions against them and maybe ending of support for Ukrainian forces. That's it, that's what they want. Pretending very specific pieces of equipment are broken in very specific ways is the exact opposite of what's in their interests because it means saying "ending narrow sanctions on one sector is sufficient to get gas moving again", instead of delivering ultimatums about general geopolitical goals.

If the gas was being stopped to try and force Europe out of the Ukrainian war then it would all have stopped overnight in one go, and Russia would have stated very clearly "the gas is stopped because we want you to change tactics, and we will resume it the moment you do so". They haven't done this. Conclusion: they do actually want to sell gas to Europe.

"The FT article is talking about oil and not gas. It also explicitly states that oil and gas payments were exempt from sanctions"

What it states is that nobody is denying that the payments couldn't be made.

Western governments have all sorts of intentions they routinely screw up and the whole sanctions regime is very decentralized. It works by punishing anyone retroactively found to have been violating sanctions, where "violation" is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. It's very easy for high level bureaucrats in Brussels to say "everything is sanctioned, you got to prison if you violate these vague rules, but stuff we want isn't sanctioned" and assume everyone will just do what they intend (both in the civil service and in industry). But the cost of getting it wrong for finance workers is prison time so it's obvious they're going to be hyper-conservative, hence the constant blockages and problems. This is a normal factor of sanctions regimes, they always whack all kinds of random innocent third parties that weren't intended to be sanctioned at all due to stuff like name collisions or bureaucratic cockups, and we aren't even talking about mistaken identities here.

"also perhaps for later court cases about breaches of contracts"

The EU seized - as in stole - all the Euros Russia had earned by selling gas but hadn't already converted into rubles and then prevented payments to Russia in euros, even though the gas contracts were denominated in that currency! This was an utterly unprecedented move given Russia and EU countries aren't at war. Contracts are thus irrelevant at this point, the EU tore them up right at the start. If anyone would sue anyone in courts of law it'd be Russia suing the EU (not that they'd be able to).

"Re: spare turbines, leaks etc"

Do you think it's reasonable to expect Gazprom employees to work with equipment after being cut off from all support by the manufacturers? Think about how allergic big companies are to even running software that isn't under a support contract, and that's in way lower stakes situations. Also, Siemens is a manufacturer that can remotely monitor and even control those turbines - one of Gazprom's concerns is that Siemens will remotely disable the turbines (again due to sanctions) and they want written legal assurance it won't happen. That's a very mild response all things considered. If I were a gas engineer I wouldn't consider such an assurance as worth the paper it was printed on.

Fundamentally, the west built and to some extent still runs that NS1 pipeline. The NS2 pipeline was built with Russian equipment and Russia has been clear that they could have turned it on at any point Germany wanted .. right up until both NS2 and NS1 appear to have been blown up this morning. Whichever country did that very obviously believes Russia will sell gas through both pipelines given a chance.