By David Child-Al­jazeera

Rus­sia’s for­eign min­is­ter has said Rus­sia does not want a war af­ter Wash­ing­ton warned Moscow may in­vade Ukraine next month.

Sergey Lavrov told Russ­ian me­dia on Fri­day that the Krem­lin was not seek­ing con­flict with Kyiv, but re­stat­ed Moscow would not al­low its se­cu­ri­ty in­ter­ests to be ig­nored.

“There won’t be a war as far as it de­pends on the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion, we don’t want a war,” he said in a live in­ter­view with Russ­ian ra­dio sta­tions.

On Thurs­day, the Unit­ed States and NA­TO re­spond­ed to Rus­sia’s sweep­ing se­cu­ri­ty de­mands that were raised in De­cem­ber af­ter Moscow built up troops near the bor­der with Ukraine. Pri­mar­i­ly, Rus­sia wants NA­TO to com­mit to per­ma­nent­ly block­ing Ukraine from be­com­ing a mem­ber of the al­liance.

Rus­sia said the replies gave it lit­tle cause for op­ti­mism be­cause there was “no pos­i­tive re­sponse to the main ques­tion”, but could serve as a start­ing point for talks on “sec­ondary ques­tions”.