INTERNATIONAL outrage has erupted around Russian disinformation which claims the bombing of a Ukrainian maternity hospital was faked.

Twitter has been urged to step in after the Russian Embassy in the UK’s official account claimed that the maternity hospital in Mariupol their nation’s forces had bombed was “long non-operational”.

READ MORE: Vladimir Putin branded 'war criminal' after Russian attack on maternity hospital

The Embassy further used the trope pushed by Vladimir Putin and his apologists to claim that the hospital had in fact been a base for “the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion”.

The embassy further claimed it had warned the UN of this, and tagged the UN and leading media publications in an image which branded photographs of wounded women being taken from the bombed hospital as “fake”.

The National: The Russian Embassy's tweetThe Russian Embassy's tweet

While the Azov Battalion is an extremist, far-right battalion based near Mariupol, there is no evidence it was using the hospital as a base of operations, as the Russians claim.

Professor Rick Fawn, a leading expert on international security and the former Communist bloc at the University of St Andrews, told The National that Russian disinformation worked well because it would use grains of truth such as this as a base for much larger and deliberately misleading claims.

The embassy’s disinformation has been met with widespread outrage, with Scottish Tory MP John Lamont writing: “Today I’ve written to @Twitter to ask why they are allowing these Russian government accounts to spread their misinformation and lies.

“Twitter should find a moral compass and ban them immediately.”

Writing to Twitter, Lamont highlighted how the platform had been "very quick to ban President [Donald] Trump" and asked why it was allowing the "spread of lies" from Putin and his associates.

The Lincoln Project, an American Republic political action committee formed to prevent Donald Trump being reelected, also asked if Twitter would continue to allow the Russian Embassy to “tweet blatant misinformation during a war of their own creation”.

Journalist and author Michael Weiss, who has written extensively on Russian disinformation, shared a story from the Associated Press on the issue, which reported on the digging of a mass grave and the evacuation of pregnant women from Mariupol.

Weiss wrote: “There were confirmed dead civilians, buried in a mass grave. A bleeding pregnant woman was evacuated on a stretcher. These people are ghouls.”

The attack on the maternity hospital saw Putin branded a “war criminal”.

A total of 17 people were reportedly wounded, with some of those injured including women in labour, regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said.

He accused Russia of carrying out the strike during an agreed ceasefire period that was meant to allow the evacuation of civilians from the besieged southern city.

Update: Twitter has now taken the Russian Embassy’s post down. The social media platform has been approached for comment.