According to the Sputnik news agency, a letter was sent to the chair of the UN's Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Maria Soledad Cisternas Reyes of Chile, urging them to intervene and investigate the blanket ban on Paralympians from the world's largest nation.

The agency reported that they refused to do so, answering that it could not reconsider decisions of organisations such as the IPC.

This alleged response was described as "informal and incorrect" by the chair of Russia's Civic Committee for Family, Children and Motherhood chair Diana Gurtskaya, who claims to have sent the letter.

But, although they confirm receipt of the letter, the UN body deny having replied.

This is partly because it has not yet been converted to a format compatible for Cisternas-Reyes, who is visually impaired, to read, they said.

"The Sputnik article is inaccurate in that Ms Cisternas Reyes and other members have not yet read the letter, much less given their reaction to it," a spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Office added to insidethegames.

"We are at a loss as to where they got the Committee's 'response' from.

"I am informed that the members will read the letter and then discuss their response to it. 

"I do not have a timeframe for this."

Russia's membership of the IPC remains suspended in the wake of Richard McLaren’s damning report, which alleged the presence of a state-sponsored doping scheme at a number of major events, including the 2014 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Sochi.

IPC President Sir Philip Craven described the anti-doping system in Russia as "broken, corrupted and entirely compromised" when justifying the suspension, while accusing the Russian Government of "catastrophically failing" its athletes.

The ban, which withstood an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, has been fiercely criticised in Russia by figures from President Vladimir Putin downwards.

Sir Philip has since been implicated in a prank phone call - released by the RT television station in Russia -  in which he claimed the country was still "non-cooperating".

"The Russians are not cooperating at the moment," he was recorded as saying to a prankster, pretending to be 400 metres hurdling champion turned United States Anti-Doping Agency chair, Edwin Moses.

"They are on the surface, they may seem as if they are, but they are not.

"We will be dealing with them, in the way we have been dealing with them ever since this thing happened, which is correctly, which is legally but we won’t be dealing with them as if they were friends."

More revelations on Russian doping in Sochi are expected to be revealed by the McLaren Report within the next month.