by Our Foreign Desk

GREEK Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras flew to Russia yesterday as creditors leaned on him to cave in to austerity cuts.

Mr Tsipras will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin today, prompting speculation that Athens will ask Moscow for credit to avoid defaulting on loan payments of €1.6 billion (£1.15bn) due on June 30.

Asked whether Russia would offer Mr Tsipras a loan, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said he could not “comment on specific decisions.”

In Luxembourg, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis met with finance ministers from the 19-country eurozone and the heads of the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank (ECB).

Mr Varoufakis refused to say whether he would present fresh proposals to break the impasse, but said he hoped his ideas would meet with favor.

“The purpose is to replace costly discord with effective consensus,” he said.

French Finance Minister Michel Sapin was optimistic, saying that “differences can be overcome” and that “the differences are not as great as people say.”

But Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem was pessimistic about the meeting and insisted that Greece had to take “further steps” toward austerity for there to be a lasting deal.

“It needs to hold up in the coming years to be credible,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ireland’s former Department of Finance secretary-general Kevin Cardiff said yesterday that the ECB had pushed Dublin into accepting a debt bailout deal in 2010.

“At the moment we entered it, we were pushed — quite hard,” he told the Oireachtas banking inquiry, which is investigating the causes of the financial crisis.