Russia: Communications minister Nikolai Nikiforov's account hacked by Turkish activists

A group of hackers who said they were a Turkish activist group blocked the Instagram account of Russia's communications minister amid heightened tensions between Moscow and Ankara.

The account of Nikolai Nikiforov with the social network was hacked by a group claiming to be the Börteçine Cyber Team, according to screenshots of the account which featured Turkish flags a portrait of the founder of modern Turkey Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and a warplane.

Instagram, where users post their pictures and videos, later restored Nikiforov's account and his profile photo, but the minister complained on the Russian social network vkontakte that the technical support team had not reacted to the incident for more than nine hours.

Relations have plummeted after Turkey shot down a Russian bomber near the Turkish-Syrian border in November which president Vladimuir Putin described as a "stab in the back". The Russian leader has called for an apology from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the incident.

Turkish media reports said in December that Russian hackers could be behind cyberattacks on Turkish internet servers, Reuters reported.

The Russian news website Meduza reported how research by the media-analysis firm Medialogia found that Russian national TV networks are now more likely to frame Turkey as Russia's most threatening foreign enemy, rather than Ukraine or the United States.

Over the course of 2015, for example, the number of mentions of Turkey in relation to terrorism increased from 20 times to more than 150 times in an average week.