Vildan Seçkiner was looking forward to seeing the sights of St Petersburg during her first trip to Russia. Instead, the 32-year-old was detained at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport for 16 hours, threatened, and deported. Her crime: holding Turkish citizenship.

Seçkiner, a post-doctoral researcher who lives in Romania, had also planned to give a lecture to a small group of students during her visit, but was stopped at passport control and taken to a holding room. Police told her she could not enter Russia as she did not have a hotel booked, but made it clear the real reason was her Turkish passport.

“When they took me to the transit area, there were many Turkish citizens there also being deported. Some had been waiting for 48 hours. Many of them were workers, who had personal belongings in Moscow and didn’t know how they were going to get them back. Others had Russian wives or girlfriends they were planning to visit,” Seçkiner told the Guardian from Bucharest.

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In response to the shooting down of a Russian Su-24 warplane by a Turkish air force jet last Tuesday, Vladimir Putin promised “serious consequences”. Economic sanctions have been imposed and all charter flights between the two countries banned. But the vengeance has been felt most keenly by Russia’s large Turkish community and Turkish visitors to the country.

“Some police officers were swearing at us in Russian,” Seçkiner said. “Someone in uniform, I don’t know exactly from which agency, got angry with me and pretended to spit at me. I just laughed because I didn’t know how to react. Then he started coming towards me aggressively, but his friends stopped him.”

Orhan Gazigil, a spokesman for the Turkish embassy in Moscow, said it had received many calls from Turkish citizens complaining about document checks and other bureaucratic hassles. The embassy itself was pelted with eggs, paint and stones last week, prompting Ankara to make an official complaint. There are about 80,000 Turkish citizens currently living in Russia, Gazigil said. Several Turkish businessmen based in Russia said they did not want to talk about the situation, even anonymously, due to its sensitivity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marrows imported from Turkey at a Moscow retailer. Fruit and vegetable imports from Turkey have been banned. Photograph: Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters

The economic measures taken against Turkey have been described as a “first step” by the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, with fruit and vegetable imports being banned, but leaving major joint energy schemes and many construction projects. Most painful for the Turkish economy will be the ban on charter flights between the countries and the foreign ministry’s advice that Russian citizens should not travel to Turkey. Last year, around 4.4 million Russians visited the country, many on package holidays.

While both sides have said they do not want to escalate the situation further, the abrasive personal styles of Putin and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are not proving conducive to rapprochement.

Erdoğan tried to speak to Putin by telephone in the hours after the plane was shot down but the Russian president did not take his call. The Turkish leader also asked Putin for a meeting at the climate change summit in Paris on Monday, but was snubbed again. Putin will only speak to Erdoğan when he is ready to apologise, aides have said. This is something Erdoğan has pointedly refused to do.

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Putin again accused Turkey of profiting from Islamic State oil sales on Monday and this time went further, saying Russia has evidence that Turkey shot the plane down in order to protect the transit corridors for the oil. For his part, Erdoğan has said he will resign if Russia can provide concrete proof of such links; he also asked on Monday whether Putin would also agree to resign if he could not substantiate the links.

While the diplomatic war continues, the thousands of Turks in Russia fear their lives have irrevocably changed. An online petition to Putin and other top officials from Russian women with Turkish husbands had attracted 2,000 signatures by Tuesday.

The petition called for Russian media to stop the “propaganda of national hatred” towards Turks. State television programmes have been devoting large chunks of time to Turkey, branding the country – formerly seen as an ally – a sponsor of Isis and even suggesting that Turkey wants to annex Crimea, which Russia itself annexed from Ukraine last year, in an attempt to rebuild the Ottoman empire. The petition also called for immigration authorities to allow Turkish citizens to remain in the country and continue working.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the G20 summit in November. Putin has accused Turkey of profiting from Islamic State oil sales. Photograph: Kayhan Ozer/AFP/Getty Images

In the region of Tatarstan, where the dominant Tatar ethnic group is of Turkic origin, Turkish companies have invested more than $1.5bn (£1bn) and were responsible for 25% of all foreign direct investment in 2014, the CEO of the region’s investment development agency, Taliya Minullina, told the Guardian. She said the measures did not prevent Turkish companies from operating in the region, though she admitted there could be “limitations”. The government has said it will not issue new work permits to Turkish citizens not already in the country.

“The Tatars and the Turks are fraternal, Turkic nations. This fact is clear to everyone, and it doesn’t depend on politics. Our links are multiple: our origins, language, religion and culture,” said Minullina.

This fraternity is being stretched by the current crisis, however. Culture minister Vladimir Medinsky has written to the governments of Tatarstan and several other regions of Russia with local Turkic ethnic groups ordering them to cut off all contacts with Türksoy, the international agency for Turkic cultures.

On Tuesday, the Russian education ministry said it would summon home all Russian students currently studying at Turkish universities on exchange programmes. The ministry said there would be no official sanctions taken against Turkish students in Russia, but there were reports of harassment and fear in the Turkish student community.

In the city of Saratov, police arrived at a student dormitory on Saturday and searched the rooms of about 20 students with sniffer dogs, selecting them specifically by nationality. The students were questioned about whether they used drugs, had their documents checked and were told to sign blank documents, according to Turkish media. In Voronezh, Turkish students were reportedly ask to write letters voluntarily ending their studies at the university.

On a Facebook group for Turkish students in Russia, students were advised not to attend nightclubs or cinemas, and not to go outside at all “except in an emergency”, and then only in groups. The student union gave its members advice on how to act in the event of a police search: “We should be respectful and cautious during inspections by officials, and we should stick to our Turkish culture and show them Turkish hospitality. Let’s welcome officials with a smiling face and offer them a cup of Turkish tea if possible.”