Wanting to negotiate with Putin outside of military logic is sabotage of the peace cause. Christoph Heusgen relies on the diplomacy of deputinization.

Shouldn't the Ukraine war be ended? "Of course it has to be stopped," Christoph Heusgen recently declared on "Lanz", adding: "But you can't say now, please, please, Wladimir, stop shooting. It doesn't stop. He doesn't go one iota."

Heusgen is the new head of the Munich Security Conference, which currently traditionally meets at the Bayerischer Hof. Angela Merkel's long-time foreign policy adviser thwarts the petitions and articles circulating under the general headline "Negotiate!" with his sober assessment of Putin. In their abstract view, these texts convey little more than the statement "non-war is better than war". Whereby the way to this non-war should then please be regularly described by others, the masterminds of the negotiation option declare themselves incompetent in this respect.

Heusgen sees himself as responsible if he wants to talk about Russia as a negotiating partner in his new book "Leadership and Responsibility" only under the reservation of "deputinization". When dealing with Russia in the future, he relies on the deputinization of the country, "because this country is totally aligned with Putin. He is the ruler who makes all decisions and also decides what goes on in the Russian media," Heusgen told the editorial network Germany.

Please, please, Vladimir!

Talking to Putin therefore only makes sense if it is possible to limit and define the horizon of meaning of his words to international law. In other words, outside of military logic, there is a linguistic logic that adheres to agreements that cannot be had with Putin.

Heusgen understands that the aloof negotiators, who ignore Putin's unreliability, lack pragmatics as the linguistic competence that is interested in the situations and origins of linguistic expressions. The repressed question is: Who wants to rely on words when breaking words is part of Putin's political program?

Of course, Heusgen's descriptions themselves are again strategically determined, the man knows about the political signal value of each of his public words. Talk like: "Please, please, Vladimir, stop shooting" he considers sabotage of the peace cause.

Land for peace?

For this reason, a deal like "Land for Peace" is unlikely to pass his lips, with which Wolfgang Ischinger, his predecessor in the office of conference chairman, recently brought the Ukrainians closer to a territorial loss perspective in "Focus". Perhaps it boils down to such an option, but why peddle it at an inopportune time?

Deputinization sounds like the antithesis of "land for peace." On the stage of diplomacy, as it took place in Munich even without a Russian delegation, there is no talk that is not a matter of negotiation.