Putin: We are awaiting an explanation, an apology and also punishment of those responsible.

Reuters/AFP/Nusa Dua, Indonesia

President Vladimir Putin demanded an apology from the Netherlands yesterday after Dutch police detained the Russian embassy’s second-ranking diplomat at his home, following a complaint by neighbours.
Russia said that Dmitry Borodin was badly beaten in front of his children by what it said were unidentified armed assailants, and lodged a formal diplomatic protest over Saturday’s incident.
A Dutch police spokeswoman Ellen van Zijl confirmed there had been an incident involving a Russian diplomat, adding: “This man is fine. He is not in the hospital.”
The Dutch foreign ministry said that the government would apologise if a police investigation found Borodin’s right to diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention had been violated.
“If the investigation shows that this was handled in a way that contravened the Vienna Convention, the Netherlands will apologise to Russia,” Dutch foreign ministry spokesman Thijs Van Son said in an e-mail to AFP.
Putin, speaking at a news conference in Indonesia after an Asia-Pacific summit, said the incident was a “very rude violation” of diplomatic rules.
“We are awaiting an explanation, an apology and also punishment of those responsible,” he said. “Depending on how the Dutch side conducts itself, we will react,” he added.
A spokeswoman for the Russian embassy in The Hague, Sofia Sarenkova, said she believed a complaint from neighbours about Borodin’s treatment of his children had been “one of the pretexts” for the incident.
Local child protection services in The Hague said they were investigating the neighbours’ complaint.
Sarenkova said that the men who visited Borodin’s apartment were “wearing something like police uniforms” but that they did not identify themselves.
She said they pushed Borodin to the ground and beat him with a baton before taking him to a police station.
The Russian foreign ministry summoned the Dutch ambassador yesterday morning and gave the Netherlands a 6pm (1400 GMT) deadline to provide an “exhaustive explanation”.
But Moscow said the response was “more than disappointing”.
“The facts speak for themselves: police break into the flat of a senior Russian diplomat at night, beat him up, handcuff him and take him to a police station,” the ministry said.
“The reaction of our Dutch partners turned out to be unintelligible, unacceptable and inappropriate,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.
Borodin had not been allowed to contact his embassy, it added.
Ties between Russia and the Netherlands have deteriorated sharply since Russian investigators last week charged 30 crew members of a Dutch-flagged Greenpeace ship, the Arctic Sunrise, with piracy over a protest against Arctic oil drilling (see report this page).
The Netherlands hit back by launching legal action to free the activists, who face up to 15 years in jail.
The Russian ministry’s spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said separately that “armed people in camouflage uniform stormed Borodin’s apartment” and beat up the diplomat in front of his children.
“This was done after Mr Borodin explained he was a diplomat. It’s well known that the residence of any diplomat cannot be touched,” Lukashevich said in comments to the Interfax news agency.
Borodin himself wrote on Twitter that police “did verify my ID and still packed me”.
Borodin, who has a four-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son, told Russian state news agency Itar-Tass that police told him his neighbours had reported ill treatment of the children.
He said he was pinned to the floor and also “received a blow to the head with a truncheon”.
He said he was now suffering from high blood pressure “evidently because of this incident”.
The diplomat alleged on Twitter that his daughter had also been injured.
“Just some hair ripped off my daughter’s head ... she was unwilling to go...” he tweeted.
Kremlin-connected political analyst Fyodor Lukyanov suggested that the Dutch actions could be part of a Cold War-style tit-for-tat.
“Special services used to resort to this in the most extreme cases. Possibly, the Dutch representatives considered what is happening now with the Arctic Sunrise to be such an extreme case,” he said.
But Borodin on Twitter dismissed the suggestion.
“No foreign, i.e. Soviet diplomat was beaten with a baton during the Cold War. No kidz had their hair torn off by police,” he tweeted.