Turkey’s PM says country won’t apologize for downing of Russian jet

Turkey's Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Monday his country will not apologize to Russia for shooting down a warplane operating over Syria that crossed through Turkish airspace.

He added that his county hopes that Moscow will reconsider economic sanctions it announced against Turkish interests after one flier was killed in the shootdown. 

Davutoglu told reporters Monday that “no Turkish prime minister or president will apologize … because of doing our duty.”

He spoke after a meeting with the NATO chief in Brussels and said Turkey remains open to talks with Russia about ways to avoid such incidents in the future.

Davutoglu also warned that such incidents continue to be a risk as long as Russia and the U.S-led coalition bombing the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Syria operate separately.

President Vladimir Putin's foreign affairs adviser has said the Russian leader hasn't taken calls from Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan because there has been no Turkish apology. Russia insists the plane did not intrude on Turkish airspace.

The comments from Davutoglu come a day after a bakery established by one of Turkey's largest humanitarian organizations, the IHH, was targeted by suspected Russian airstrikes in Syria's Idlib province. Syrian opposition activists blamed Russia for the attack, which left at least 44 people dead.

The IHH said via Twitter on Monday that the bakery, which was established 16 months ago, provided daily bread for nearly 45,000 internally displaced Syrians. Mustafa Ozbek, from the IHH's media office in Istanbul, told Al Jazeera that the bakery — in the town of Saraqeb — was destroyed in the attack.

Russia says it targets ISIL and other armed groups, but critics accuse Moscow of targeting other rebel groups more than ISIL. Idlib is not a stronghold of ISIL, which controls wide areas of eastern Syria.

The Syrian Observatory reported last week that Russian air operations have killed over 400 civilians since Russian forces launched airstrikes in September this year.

The Syrian conflict has killed at least 250,000 people, according to the U.N., and more than half of Syria's prewar population of 22.4 million has been internally displaced or has fled abroad.

Al Jazeera and wire services. Diana al-Rifai contributed to this report from Doha.