Russia won't start a war in Ukraine, says foreign minister

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday that Moscow will not start a war in Ukraine, but warned that it wouldn't allow the West to trample on its security interests, amid fears it is planning to invade its neighbour.

U.S. President Joe Biden warned Ukraine's leader a day earlier that there is a "distinct possibility" that Russia could take military action against the former Soviet state in February.

"There won't be a war as far as it depends on the Russian Federation — we don't want a war," Lavrov said in a live interview with Russian radio stations. "But we won't let our interests be rudely trampled on and ignored."

Tensions have soared in recent weeks, and the United States and its NATO allies warily eyed a buildup of more than 100,000 Russian troops near Ukraine, worrying that Moscow was preparing to attack.

Russia has repeatedly denied having such plans, but has demanded that NATO promise Ukraine will never be allowed to join the alliance and that NATO roll back deployments of troops and military equipment in Eastern Europe.

The U.S. and NATO formally rejected those demands this week, though Washington outlined areas where discussions are possible, offering hope that there could be a way to avoid war.

Russia's official response to those proposals will come from President Vladimir Putin, but the Kremlin has said there was "little ground for optimism."

Lavrov echoed that grim note Friday.

"While they say they won't change their positions, we won't change ours," he said. "I don't see any room for compromise here."

Putin opened the weekly meeting of his Security Council on Friday, saying only that it would address foreign policy issues.

Later, in a video call with French President Emmanuel Macron, the Kremlin said Putin emphasized that the U.S. and NATO failed to consider Russia's key demands: precluding NATO's expansion, stopping the deployment of alliance weapons near Russian borders and rolling back its forces from Eastern Europe.

At the same time, Putin spoke in favour of continuing talks about a stalled peace agreement for eastern Ukraine, where Russia-backed rebels are fighting Ukrainian forces. Those talks are among Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany, and presidential envoys from the four countries met in Paris on Wednesday and agreed to have another meeting in Berlin in two weeks.

Following the 2014 ouster of a Kremlin-friendly president in Kyiv, Moscow annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and began backing the insurgency in the country's eastern industrial heartland.

Earlier, Lavrov noted that the U.S. suggested the two sides could talk about limits on the deployment of intermediate-range missiles, restrictions on military drills and rules to prevent accidents between warships and aircraft. He said that Russia proposed discussing those issues years ago — but Washington and its allies never took them up on it until now.