Russia won't allow foreign organizations to finance political activities in the country, President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday in the latest in a series of Kremlin statements assailing Western-funded non-governmental groups.

Meeting with human rights experts to discuss how to strengthen civil society in Russia, Putin said authorities needed to "de-bureaucratize" how nonprofit groups get grants and financing.

But he also said he had information that certain foreign groups were paying for specific political activities in Russia.

"Not a single, self-respecting country will allow that, and neither will we," Putin said. "Let us solve our internal problems ourselves."

The Kremlin has shown increasing discomfort with Western-funded NGOs as mass protests have swept through parts of the former Soviet Union in the past two years. Many Russian politicians contend that Western funding was behind the protests that drove out the longtime presidents of Georgia and Kyrgyzstan and that forced a rerun of Ukraine's presidential elections, in which the Kremlin-favored candidate lost.

Putin lamented that Russia's nonprofit organizations were getting little assistance from domestic and foreign donors, and called for developing ways for the state to help them. He noted, though, that this aid should not be considered "some kind of bribery on the part of the state, that this is some form of dependency."