Russian President Vladimir Putin during a visit to the National Mineral Resources University in St Petersburg, yesterday, where he told students that a foreign Nato legion is fighting alongside government forces in Ukraine. Photo: Reuters

In a provocative new charge addressed at Western powers, Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said a “foreign Nato legion” is fighting alongside Ukrainian government forces. Nato called the accusation “nonsense”.

“Unfortunately, Ukrainian authorities are refusing a peaceful solution. They don’t want political efforts,” Putin told a group of students yesterday in St Petersburg.

“There are official divisions of the armed forces but to a great extent there are so-called voluntary nationalist battalions. This is not even an army, it’s a foreign legion. In this case it’s a foreign Nato legion,” Putin said.

Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg dismissed Putin’s accusation.

“The statement that there is a Nato legion in Ukraine is nonsense. There is no Nato legion,” Stoltenberg told reporters yesterday.

“The foreign forces in Ukraine are Russian, so I think that is in a way the problem, that there are Russian forces in Ukraine and Russia backs the separatists with equipment,” he continued.

Meanwhile earlier yesterday Russian law enforcement officials raided the premises of Tatar television station ATR in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Moscow annexed from Ukraine last March, triggering criticism from the OSCE, the European rights watchdog.

Crimean Tatars, a large ethnic minority in the region, mainly opposed the annexation and have come under pressure to align themselves with the new authorities ever since.

Russia’s federal Investigative Committee, which answers directly to President Vladimir Putin, who describes Crimea as “sacred” to Russia, said it was searching ATR’s offices as part of a probe into the death of two locals during a rally a year ago.

An ATR representative told Reuters from the regional capital Simferopol that the search started at 11am, shutting down most of the channel’s broadcasting. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said ATR must be allowed to resume broadcasting as soon as possible.

The Investigative Committee said it believed ATR had recordings of a rally in Crimea on February 26, 2014, during which state officials and members of a pro-Russian group were injured. Two locals died as a result, it said. Russian troops wrested the Black Sea peninsula away from Kiev after street protests in Kiev ousted Moscow-backed president Viktor Yanukovych.