By Angeliki Koutantou and Alastair Macdonald
ATHENS/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker stepped up contacts with Greece's new leftist leader on Tuesday to try to bridge differences on the country's debt crisis but EU officials cautioned against expecting any breakthrough this week.
Ahead of crunch meetings of euro zone finance ministers on Wednesday and EU leaders on Thursday, Juncker telephoned Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to seek a formula for extending euro zone assistance to Athens after its international bailout expires at the end of this month.
The EU executive said the conversation took place in a "positive spirit of cooperation", seeking to calm rising alarm in Western capitals at the risk of a Greek exit from the single currency area that could trigger wider financial instability.
However, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and a Commission spokeswoman dismissed media reports of an EU compromise plan that lifted Greek and European financial markets and the euro on Tuesday.
"There is no Juncker plan at this stage, of no matter how many points, there is no such plan at this stage," Commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva told journalists in Brussels.
"That being said, of course very intense contacts are going on between the president, prime minister Tsipras and other players involved in the euro zone and beyond, but up to this point all these contacts have not been very fruitful."
EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said a meeting of Eurogroup finance ministers on Feb. 16 would be decisive, and reaffirmed the EU's insistence that Greece must extend its current bailout programme for a solution to be found.
Tsipras has said Athens has no intention of requesting an extension of the 240 billion euro EU/IMF bailout and is intent on reversing what he has called "cruel" austerity imposed by foreign creditors that has impoverished many Greeks.
His tough stance has proved popular at home, with 75 percent of Greek backing him, an opinion poll showed.
Schaeuble said after a meeting of G20 finance ministers in Istanbul that if Greece did not want a new aid programme "then that's it", adding he expected to hear something binding from Athens on Wednesday.
"PLAN B"
Maintaining a drum beat of hostile rhetoric for domestic consumption as the radical administration seeks a parliamentary vote of confidence later on Tuesday, Defence Minister Panos Kammenos said Greece could look to Russia or China if it failed to get a new debt deal with the euro zone.
"What we want is a deal," the hardline nationalist said on television. "But if there is no deal ... and if we see that Germany remains rigid and wants to blow apart Europe, then we have the obligation to go to Plan B. Plan B is to get funding from another source.
"It could be the United States at best, it could be Russia, it could be China or other countries," Kammenos added.
Another minister announced in parliament plans to halt a Canadian-run gold mine project
Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has proposed a six-month transition during which Greece wants to be allowed to issue more short-term treasury bills, run a smaller budget surplus and receive European Central Bank profits on Greek bond holdings.
He said on Monday Athens wants to scrap about 30 percent of the current bailout's conditions, to be replaced by measures approved by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and implement 70 percent of the recommendations.
Greece would use the interim period to negotiate a rescheduling of its official debt, swapping euro zone government loans for GDP-linked bonds and ECB-held debt for interest-bearing perpetual bonds, he said.
EU officials say the proposals were unlikely to be acceptable in anything like their current form, but they might contain the seeds of a compromise under which debt repayments would be extended further into the distant future, with a longer grace period before interest payments fall due.
Euro zone creditors led by Germany, the bloc's main paymaster, first want to see firm commitments to an economic reform programme under outside supervision incorporating policies agreed by the previous conservative-led government.
German Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann, an influential member of the European Central Bank's governing council, said Greece needed to make a credible effort to get back on its feet via solid public finances and a more competitive economy.
"I am firmly convinced that Greece can only solve its problems in the long run by making its public finances solid and its economy more competitive," he told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the G20 session in Istanbul.
The short-term emergency lending assistance by the Greek central bank to commercial banks which the ECB authorised last week when it shut their access to its main lending window must be tied to strict conditions, Weidmann said.
Giving the new government a little breathing space, Greek bankers said on Tuesday that deposit outflows had slowed so far in February after a sharp increase in the run-up to the victory of Tsipras' far-left Syriza party on Jan. 25.
(Additional reporting by Gernot Heller in Istanbul, George Georgiopoulos, Renee Maltezou, Lefteris Papadimas and Jeremy Gaunt in Athens, Adrian Croft and Tom Koerkemeier in Brussels; Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Giles Elgood)
