Rhetorically… for now.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has used crude language in a furious new attack on Turkey over the downing of a Russian combat jet last month.

The incident on the Syria-Turkey border was a “hostile act” but Russia was “not the country” to run away, he told his annual news conference.

“The Turks”, he said, had “decided to lick the Americans in a certain place”.

There was, he said, a “creeping Islamisation of Turkey that would have Ataturk rolling in his grave”.

The remark appeared to be aimed at President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose AKP party, with its Islamist roots, has been accused of seeking to dismantle the secular state founded by Kemal Ataturk.