Media watchdogs have called in executives from RT, the Kremlin-backed news channel, to discuss its repeated failure to meet the impartiality standards required to hold a broadcasting licence.

It is understood that senior RT staff are due to travel from Moscow to meet regulators at Ofcom next month.

The meeting has been called in the wake of RT’s latest breach of impartiality rules, identified by Ofcom in December.

In a programme called CrossTalk last July, RT broadcast a debate about a Nato summit in which all members of the panel were critical of the military alliance.

The summit was described as “badly staged, badly signalled, political theatre” and Nato as “a minute group of megalomaniac powerbrokers hell bent on sending us into a third world war”.

The programme included a series of captions that highlighted Kemlin viewpoints such as “ “military buildup is part of Nato’s 'anti-Russia hysteria’” and “calling Russia aggressive is tactic to get Nato to spend more”.

Ofcom’s investigation, launched in response to a viewer complaint of “bias against America and the West”, found that RT had failed to present alternative viewpoints on Nato as is required by impartiality rules.

The state broadcaster behind the channel, TV Novosti, said it had tried to book guests with different views but they had all refused to appear.