In the blue sky above northern Syria, a dark shape moved. It was a Russian SU-24 attack aircraft. Over the past week, Russian jets based at the Khmeimim airbase in coastal Latakia had been pounding rebel positions. Under cover of Russian air strikes, Syrian government forces have been been attacking. Their target wasn't Islamic State. Rather, the SU-24s had been hitting the homes and villages of Turkmens, Syrian citizens of Turkish ethnicity.

At about 7am, an SU-24 took off on another mission. It began flying north towards the border and a densely wooded area known as Turkmen mountain.

07:24 According to Turkey, the SU-24 looped several times over the attack zone and then headed towards Turkey, a Nato member state. It was, seemingly, the latest provocative incursion by Russian fighters into Turkish airspace. Earlier this month, Russian SU-30 and SU-24 jets did the same thing, despite warnings. Russia later admitted that one jet had got lost. On that occasion, Nato answered with an angry press release.

This time, the response was different. Turkey’s general staff said it warned the SU-24 “10 times within five minutes” that it was about to violate Turkish airspace. Apparently, the jet’s Russian pilots carried on. Turkey scrambled two F-16 fighters. At 7.24am, one of them opened fire with an air-to-air missile, believed to be a US-made Aim-9 sidewinder. It was the first time a Nato member state had attacked a Russian plane since the cold war.

Video filmed by Haberturk TV shows the plane falling from the sky. It looks like a comet, orange flame and white-grey smoke coming from its tail.

You can hear a rumble. After several seconds, the SU-24 disappears from view and ploughs into the mountainside. There is a cloud of thick black smoke. The video shows something else: the two Russian pilots falling to Earth in white parachutes, having ejected. It is unclear if they are alive.

08:30 As news of the incident broke, Russia's defence ministry gave its first response. According to Moscow, the downed SU-24 did not violate Turkish airspace. It was at all times inside Syria, it said, adding that "objective monitoring data" backed this version of events.

The defence ministry further suggested that the missile responsible had been fired “from the ground”. The plane was flying at a height 6,000m, it said. One pro-Kremlin military analyst went further, suggesting the rebels had used a Ukrainian missile to shoot the aircraft down “on Washington’s orders”.

The Turkish military countered with flight radar images which appeared to show the plane crossing, briefly, a finger of Turkish territory in Hatay province sticking into Syria. The plane crashed near the Turkmen town of Bayirbucak, close to the Syrian-Turkish border.

09:00 For much of the day, the fate of the two Russian pilots was a matter of confusion. One video taken by rebel fighters appears to show parachutes tumbling from the sky into rebel-held territory. A second video, deemed authentic by experts, shows a pilot, his face badly battered, lying on the ground.

He appears to be immobile and possibly dead. The pilot is blond and wearing Russian uniform; his vest and arm patch are similar to those of other crew photographed in Latakia.

One voice can be heard shouting: “A Russian pilot!” Another says: “The 10th division has captured a Russian pilot! God is greatest!” The gunmen crowd around the body.

Jahed Ahmad, a commander with the anti-government 10th coastal brigade, said that the two Russians had tried to navigate their parachutes into government-held areas. They did not succeed. Members of his group shot at the pilots from a distance, he said. Early reports said one or both Russians were dead.

Two Russian military helicopters began a search for the pilots. Reports suggested that one of the helicopters may have been downed by rebels using a Tow missile. An unconfirmed video shows rebels blowing up a stationary helicopter on the ground. The second helicopter reportedly rescued the first stricken helicopter’s crew.

10:50 With no immediate word from Vladimir Putin, diplomats were weighing the most important question: how would the Russian president respond? Russia began its military operation in Syria in late September. Ostensibly, it was aimed at Islamic State. In reality, Russian jets had mostly bombed non-Isis groups fighting the regime of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, Moscow's key regional ally. These bombings had taken place predominantly in the north-west, especially around Russia's coastal bases, far from Isis territory.

The incident was an accident waiting to happen. It followed numerous Nato-Russia “near misses” over the Baltic states, North Sea and the English channel caused by Russian jets flying provocatively close to Nato aircraft and civilian airlines.

12:50 Putin was furious. He called the incident “a stab in the back, carried out by the accomplices of terrorists”. He said that “our aircraft was downed over territory of Syria” and fell on to Syrian territory “4km from Turkey”.

According to Putin, the SU-24s bombs were intended for “international terrorists”. He suggested that Turkey’s government was deliberately aiding Islamic State and allowing it to make “hundreds of millions and billions of dollars from illicit arms sales”.

16:00 Turkey briefed Nato ambassadors in Brussels. Meanwhile, the White House confirmed that the SU-24 had indeed violated Turkish airspace – for a matter of seconds. According to Ankara, in a letter to the UN security council, the aircraft had been above Turkish territory for 17 seconds. And during this brief visit it was shot down. – Guardian service