Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday demanded an apology from the Netherlands for briefly detaining a Russian diplomat in The Hague in an escalating spat between the two countries.

Putin called the detention over the weekend of Russian diplomat Dmitry Borodin "the most gross breach of the Vienna Convention."

"We will react depending on how the Dutch side behaves," he said at a news conference at a regional summit in Indonesia.

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.

The Netherlands hit back by launching legal action to free the activists, who face up to 15 years in jail.

The Russian foreign ministry on Tuesday accused Dutch police of raiding Borodin's apartment and beating him up before taking him to a police station for hours of questioning on accusations of mistreating his children.

The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations grants diplomats immunity from arrest.

The Dutch foreign ministry confirmed to AFP that the diplomat had been detained and said police were investigating what happened.

"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 email to AFP.

But the Russian foreign ministry said the Dutch response "in no way could satisfy the Russian side."

"The reaction of our Dutch partners turned out to be unintelligible, unacceptable and inappropriate," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated in an interview with Russian television that his country was still expecting a full explanation.

"The police has no right to enter an apartment of a diplomat. And we expect our Dutch friends to issue an explanation, to issue an apology, and to punish those who violated the Vienna Convention," Lavrov told the RT channel.

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".

The Russian foreign ministry has handed a note of protest to the Dutch ambassador over the incident. It called for official apologies and compensation for the material and "moral" damage caused.

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 during the Saturday night raid 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.

The press attache of the Russian embassy in the Netherlands, Sofia Sarenkova, said Borodin was treated in hospital after his detention.

"He suffered from a beating, as far as I know," she told AFP.

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.