Germany will spend at least 65 billion euros ($64.7 billion) on shielding customers and businesses from soaring inflation, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Sunday, two days after Russia announced it was suspending some gas deliveries indefinitely.

The measures, agreed after 22 hours of talks between the three coalition parties, included benefit hikes and a public transport subsidy, to be paid for from a tax on electricity companies and by bringing forward Germany's implementation of the planned 15% global minimum corporate tax.

In Germany, where annual inflation was running at 7.9% in August, the effect has been exacerbated by Russia's reduction in volumes of gas pumped to the country, which has caused a surge in the price of energy fuelling Europe's largest economy.

The energy crunch came into sharper relief when Russia's state-controlled energy giant Gazprom (GAZP) said on Friday that it was keeping closed its main Nord Stream 1 pipeline, the biggest single pipeline carrying Russian gas to Germany. However, Scholz rejected suggestions that losing the steady flows of cheap Russian gas off which Germany has prospered for decades could herald a new, darker era for his country.