Turkey will rue its downing of Russian warplane, Putin vows

"But if anyone thinks that having committed this terrible war crime, the murder of our people, that they are going to get away with some measures concerning their tomatoes or some limits on construction and other sectors, they are sorely mistaken", Putin continued. "And evidently Allah chose to punish the ruling clique in Turkey by depriving them of their intelligence and reason".

The Russian president reiterated that Russia believes that the Turkish leadership makes money from smuggling crude oil obtained by Daesh terrorist group in territories that the Takfiri group occupies in Syria and Iraq.

Calling the allegations that Ankara was buying oil from IS "nonsense", Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu accused the Kremlin of practicing a crude "Soviet-style propaganda", saying, "This was an old tradition, but it has suddenly reared its head again", .

Putin said that Russian Federation will take other retaliatory moves against Turkey, but will not engage in saber rattling.

The comments were the latest in what has been a deteriorating relationship between Russia and NATO-member Turkey, after the latter downed a Russian fighter jet last month.

Moscow denies the Turkish claims about warnings sent to the pilots, and Putin's first reaction last week was to call Ankara's actions "a stab in the back by terrorists' accomplices".

"We were prepared to cooperate with Turkey on most sensitive issues and go further than their allies".

"We will remind them not once about what they have done, and they will feel sorry about it a few times".

Moscow says its warplanes have been targeting terrorist groups near Syria's border with Turkey, while Ankara says the Russian airstrikes have been aimed at moderate militant groups made up of ethnic Turks who oppose Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.

"Turkey is the main consumer of the oil stolen from its rightful owners, Syria and Iraq".

"Today, we are presenting only some of the facts that confirm that a whole team of bandits and Turkish elites stealing oil from their neighbors is operating in the region", Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov told a Moscow news conference Wednesday.

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the president's statement didn't mean that Russian military officers have been put in charge of some Syrian army units or deployed to the frontline to help coordinate the air strikes. "If they do, I would not remain on the presidential seat for one minute", Erdogan said.

A senior State Department official on Friday cast doubt on a Russian assertion that Turkish government officials illegally buy large amounts of oil from Islamic State militants in Syria. The Russian leader, throughout the speech, talked about the US and the West just once - that too in a passing, indirect reference.

He said Russian Federation has information that oil from IS-controlled areas of Syria is "transported on an industrial scale to Turkey". With Russia suffering a deep recession and constricted by Western sanctions over Ukraine, he cast many of his aims in terms of national security, encouraging a balanced budget and self sufficiency in food production.


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