“Only Allah knows why they did it,” Putin said about the downing in an hour-long address to Russian lawmakers and other public figures, Russia’s own state of the union address. “And I guess Allah decided to punish the ruling clique in Turkey by stripping it of its sanity.”…

“We are not planning to and will not engage in saber-rattling,” Putin said. “But if someone thinks that he can commit a foul war crime, the murder of our people, and just get away with some tomatoes or limits in construction and other spheres, then he is deeply mistaken.”

Putin also defended his decision to deploy troops and warplanes to Syria in late September, recalling the terrorist attacks committed in Russia since the mid-1990s and adding that Russia must fight terrorism abroad to prevent it from striking at home.

He also took aim at the United States and the West for the wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, saying it he said destabilized a region “that looked quite good until recently but are now areas of anarchy.”