Turkish president warns Russia ‘not to play with fire’

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned Russia not to "play with fire" following reports that Turkish businessmen had been detained in Russia, according to Al Jazeera

Russian president Vladimir Putin said it would suspend visa-free travel with Turkey, and it will ask over 9,000 Russians currently in Turkey to return home by the end of December, after relations between the two countries are at their lowest in recent memory. On Tuesday, Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet near the Syrian border and the pilot was machine-gunned dead by rebels on the ground in Syria as he parachuted down.

Russia has since threatened economic retaliation, which Erdogan has dismissed as emotional and indecorous.

"It is playing with fire to go as far as mistreating our citizens who have gone to Russia,"  Al Jazeera  reports Erdogan telling supporters during a speech in Bayburt in northeast Turkey on Friday.

"We really attach a lot of importance to our relations with Russia ... We don't want these relations to suffer harm in any way."

Erdogan has reportedly said he wants to speak with Putin at the climate summit in Paris starting on Monday, but Putin has so far refused to talk to Erdogan because he has not yet apologised for the downing of the jet. Reports say that Erdogan has said Turkey deserves the apology because its airspace was violated.

Al Jazeera adds that the five-year-old Syrian civil war has been complicated by Russian air strikes in defence of President Bashar al-Assad. Turkey and regional powers have accused Russia of targeting moderate armed groups fighting Assad, leading to volatile relations between the two countries.