‘I do not believe it’

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said yesterday he did not believe the conflict in Ukraine would spiral into a nuclear war but cautioned the United States and Europe that Moscow never again wanted to be dependent on the West.

Russia's economy is facing the gravest crisis since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union after the West slapped heavy sanctions on almost the entire Russian financial and corporate system following Moscow's February 24 invasion of Ukraine.

Asked by a Kremlin correspondent for Russia's Kommersant newspaper if he thought a nuclear war could be triggered, Lavrov told reporters in Turkey: "I don't want to believe it, and I do not believe it."

Lavrov, President Vladimir Putin's foreign minister since 2004, said the nuclear theme had been thrown into discussions only by the West, which he said kept on returning to nuclear war like Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis.

"Of course it gives us cause for concern when the West, like Freud, keeps on returning and returning to this topic," Lavrov said after talks in Antalya, Turkey with his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba.