Greece's government will not cooperate with the EU and IMF mission bankrolling the country and will not seek an extension to the bailout programme, its finance minister said today.

Jeroen Dijsselbloem, head of the eurozone finance ministers' group who is in Athens for talks with the new government, said the two sides would decide what would happen next before the programme ends on February 28.

"This platform enabled us to win the confidence of the Greek people," Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis told reporters after their meeting. "Our first action as a government will not be to reject the rationale of questioning this programme through a request to extend it."

Varoufakis said he had assured Dijsselbloem that Athens planned to implement reforms to make the economy more competitive and have balanced budgets but that it would not accept a "self-fed crisis" of deflation and non-viable debt.

In turn, Dijsselbloem said he had told the new government to respect the terms of the existing agreement between Greece and the eurozone and warned against taking unilateral steps, saying it was important not to reverse progress made so far.

He said continuing support from Europe depended on Greece respecting its obligations and it was up to to Athens to decide its position before moving forward jointly with the eurozone.

Meanwhile Germany bluntly rejected suggestions that Greece should be forgiven repayment of its rescue loans, while a top eurozone official said there was no decision yet on what to do after the country's bailout program runs out at the end of February.

"The discussion about a debt cut or a debt conference is divorced from reality," Martin Jaeger, a German finance ministry spokesman, said in Berlin.

Jaeger said Greece was obliged to abide by the terms of its €240 billion bailout program agreed by previous governments or endanger the deal.

Without the rescue loans from its fellow eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund, Greece would go bankrupt.

"If the measures announced by the new government in Athens were implemented, then one has to ask whether the basis of the program wouldn't be called into question and therefore pointless," he said.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' new government has already said it will not move ahead with several planned privatization projects or aim for budget surpluses required to pay down Greece's massive national debt.

Greece's bailout, which began in May 2010, runs out on February 28 after an initial two-month extension was granted.

"We will decide before that time what happens next. That is the position where we are ... No conclusions are drawn yet," Dijsselbloem said.

"As for a call for a conference on debt restructuring, you realize that this conference already exists and it's called the Eurogroup," he said, referring to the monthly gatherings of eurozone finance ministers.

Varoufakis, for his part, said Greece was not asking for an extension of the existing bailout, as it disputed the very wisdom of the program in the first place.

"Our intention is to - with an absolute will to cooperate - to persuade our partners ... that our common interest in Europe is served best by a new agreement that will emerge following talks between all Europeans," he said.

He said the new government would not be talking to the bailout negotiators from the "troika" — the European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF.

Instead, the minister said, the government would cooperate with the "legitimate institutions of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund."