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Putin Blames ‘Criminal Negligence’ for Deadly Mall Blaze For Putin, Mall Fire Is Bigger Headache Than Diplomatic Feud With West
(about 4 hours later)
MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia visited the Siberian city of Kemerovo on Tuesday, calling the shopping mall fire that killed at least 64 people there the result of “criminal negligence,” while thousands of people protested nearby to demand transparency and accountability. MOSCOW — At the end of a month that has seen him unveil new “invincible” missiles that can circle the globe, announce a space mission to Mars and secure a sky-high vote in Russia’s presidential election, President Vladimir V. Putin came down to earth on Tuesday to face a grim reality on the ground.
“I want to say that the entire country is mourning together with you, with Kemerovo residents,” Mr. Putin said at a meeting with local officials before calling for a moment of silence, according to a transcript on the Kremlin’s website. Mr. Putin traveled to Siberia to lay flowers next to a pile of fluffy animals at a makeshift memorial for at least 64 people, many of them children, who burned to death on Sunday in a shopping mall.
But the president soon shifted his focus to the circumstances of Russia’s deadliest blaze in a decade, demanding an inquiry into the fire on Sunday, including into how permits were issued and rescue efforts organized. “How could this ever happen?” Mr. Putin asked local officials, echoing a question now being asked across Russia by a population that just recently voted overwhelming to re-elect a president who, during his previous 18 years in power, repeatedly boasted of making Russia strong and safe.
“What is going on here?” Mr. Putin asked at the meeting in Kemerovo, an industrial city of about half a million 2,000 miles east of Moscow. “It is not a war, not an unexpected methane explosion at a mine. People, children, came to a mall for entertainment.” Public anger at the horrendous fire, which left children banging on locked exit doors and screaming for help from their parents over cellphones, drowned out official fury over Monday’s expulsion of Russian diplomats by 23 countries and, even on state-controlled television, pushed aside routine denunciations of the West as the agent of Russia’s ills.
“We have lost so many,” he continued. “Why? Because of criminal negligence and mismanagement.” The number of diplomats ordered to leave their posts over a nerve-agent attack in England on a former Russian spy and his daughter, for which Britain has blamed Russia, rose to more than 150 on Tuesday.
Russian officials confirmed on Monday that emergency exits at the mall had been blocked and that a security guard had switched off the fire alarm system. Horrific accounts of children struggling to escape the blazing shopping mall, however, distracted public attention from a diplomatic crisis that would normally have been seized on by the Kremlin to stoke patriotic fervor and promote its view of Russia as a besieged fortress whose problems are mostly because of “Russophobic” foreigners.
Aman Tuleyev, governor of the Kemerovo region, asked Mr. Putin for his forgiveness but went on to accuse opposition forces of exploiting the tragedy to sow discord. “It’s sacrilege when there’s grief and you use it to solve your own problems,” he said. Russia-24, a round-the-clock state news channel, tried early Monday to stick to its usual fare of patriotic programming, broadcasting a panel “discussion” featuring fiery tirades against the West. But even that exercise had to pause to give the announcer time to express condolences over the deaths in Siberia.
Thousands of demonstrators rallied on Tuesday in a central square of Kemerovo, steps from the regional government offices where the meeting was held, calling for Mr. Tuleyev’s resignation and a transparent investigation. Neither Mr. Tuleyev nor Mr. Putin visited the site of the demonstration, although the president held an unscheduled meeting with city residents who expressed low confidence in the investigation, the news agency Interfax reported. By afternoon, however, the coverage was focused almost entirely on the shopping mall tragedy and a tightly choreographed visit by Mr. Putin to the grief-stricken town of Kemerovo, more than 2,000 miles east of Moscow.
Local officials who addressed the protesters faced a climate of anger and distrust. The news website Znak reported that one official, Sergey Tsivilev, the region’s deputy governor, met with cries of “The truth!” and “Resign!” Mr. Putin’s comforting words in Siberia, where he harangued officials and visited a makeshift memorial piled with stuffed toy animals, had to compete with a rival narrative of official bungling and corruption spread on social media and on the website of Aleksei A. Navlny, the anti-corruption campaigner who was barred from running in the March 18 election against Mr. Putin.
Demonstrators also demanded that Mr. Putin come to face the crowd, and sought explanations about nondisclosure agreements that relatives of victims and doctors treating the injured are said to have been instructed to sign, according to witnesses quoted in news reports. Eager to keep control of the story, Mr. Putin warned people to stick to official information. “You know it very well that social media is a murky source unfortunately,” he told officials and relatives in Kemerovo. “We need to rely on the results of the actual inquiry.”
At one point, Mr. Tsivilev, speaking to protesters through a megaphone, referred to the official death toll of 64 recorded in the fire. “Why are you lying?” one man shouted. Another climbed onto the platform from which Mr. Tsivilev was speaking to confront him, according to a live stream from the protests by the video service Ruptly. That Russia is far being a monolithic one-party state, despite Mr. Putin’s lopsided re-election, was clear from the organization in Moscow on Tuesday of two separate events to mourn the dead in Kemerovo.
Mr. Tsivilev suggested that the man, who identified himself as Igor Vostrikov, was using the tragedy to attract attention. One was state-sponsored near the Kremlin; the other, featuring candles but also banners with the words “corruption kills,” was held in Pushkin Square by Muscovites who wanted no part in the official gathering. Mourners at the alternative wake, mostly young people, chanted “what did these children die for?” and “we want the truth!”
“I have lost my sister Sabadash Alyona Igorevna; my wife, Vostrikova Elena Sergeevna; three children, 5, 7 and 2 years old,” the man replied. “I came here for self-promotion, did I?” Instead of fuming at the United States and its allies, Mr. Putin drew from another tool in his repertoire of responses to most problems: He set the security apparatus to work, telling relatives of the victims that the Investigative Committee, Russia’s answer to the F.B.I., had deployed 100 investigators and would find those responsible for the fire and punish them.
Mr. Vostrikov is emerging as a kind of leader of the incensed protesters in the grieving city. Taking to social media, he voiced a growing sentiment about a lack of accountability for the tragedy. He blamed “criminal negligence” and “slovenliness” for the blaze, which started in a children’s play area and then swept through nearby cinemas crowded with young people.
“I no longer have a family. The ruling regime is guilty,” Mr. Vostrikov wrote. “They will find a scapegoat and this will be a done issue. But the threats incompetence, widespread corruption, alcoholism and total degradation of society will go nowhere.” The regional governor, Aman Tuleyev, a relic of the Soviet era, begged for forgiveness and accused opposition activists of trying to exploit the tragedy for political ends. “It’s sacrilege when there’s grief and you use it to solve your own problems,” the governor said.
The Kremlin transcript appears to have left out one telling statement that Mr. Tuleyev, the governor, made during the meeting with Mr. Putin, according to a video that is being widely shared on social media. “My task is not to allow what’s taking place, which is that lies are being used to profit from the grief of others and achieve unclear no actually, very clear goals: to damage reputations,” he said. But Mr. Putin avoided mention of what many, including those who lost family members, believe was the real cause of the fire: a state system, including multiple agencies responsible for controlling fires and other risks, eaten away by corruption and incompetence.
Apparently in an effort to address the protesters’ demands for evidence of the official death tally, the Kemerovo authorities have granted access to the morgue where the victims’ bodies were taken. The city administration also published the names of some of the dead and injured. Igor Vostrikov, who lost his wife, three children and a sister in the fire, summed up this view with an enraged message on social media. “I no longer have a family,” Mr. Vostrikov wrote. “The ruling regime is guilty. Every bureaucrat dreams of stealing like Putin. Every state functionary treats people like garbage.”
Although the death toll has risen to 64, it could go higher. The Investigative Committee, Russia’s equivalent of the F.B.I., said it had received reports of 67 missing people. Of the 59 bodies delivered to morgues some damaged so badly that they can be identified only by DNA analysis 21 have been identified. Government investigators, added Mr. Vostrikov, “will find a scapegoat, and the issue will be done with, but the threats incompetence, widespread corruption, alcoholism and total degradation of society will go nowhere.”
Residents and relatives are compiling a list of their own, however, which they plan to compare with the official record, Znak reported. Just a few yards from the regional government offices were Mr. Putin met local officials, thousands of people gathered in Kemerovo’s central square, calling on the governor to resign and pouring scorn on those who repeated an official death toll that many believe undercounted the real number of victims.
Rallies honoring the victims were held across Russia on Tuesday. In Moscow, two events were scheduled: a state-organized rally at 5 p.m.; and a separate, unofficial gathering at 7 p.m., in which more than 15,000 people on Facebook have expressed interest. Mr. Putin and the governor, Mr. Tuleyev, stayed away from the square. The governor’s deputy, Sergei Tsivilev, did visit and, according to the news website Znak, was met with cries of “The truth!” “Resign!” and demands that Mr. Putin come and address the throng.
Mr. Putin has also declared a nationwide day of mourning on Wednesday. Mr. Putin knows from bitter experience how easily a tragedy can rebound against him. In 2000, his first year in office, he traveled to a naval port in the Arctic Circle in a disastrous attempt to calm the grief of the widows and relatives of the 118 crewmen who perished in the sinking of the Kursk submarine, during which Moscow declined foreign help in rescuing the crew despite not having equipment of its own needed to launch a rescue operation.
The Kursk submarine fiasco was quickly followed by a Kremlin push to take control of NTV, a privately owned television station that had given voice to grieving widows and contributed to a public relations disaster that looked for a time like it might cripple the then newly installed president. NTV, now firmly under state control, is today one of Mr. Putin’s loudest cheerleaders.
Public distrust generated by the Kursk tragedy was then reinforced by multiple tragedies involving the authorities’ incompetent and brutal response to hostage takings by terrorists at a Moscow theater in 2002, during a performance of a musical called “Nord-Ost,” and at a school in the southern Russian town of Beslan in 2004.
Increasingly tight control of the news media, ratcheted up after each such tragedy, has done little to dissipate this distrust and may even have aggravated it.
“Even if the official death toll reflects reality, at the end of the day people know how the government lied in Beslan, Nord-Ost, Kursk and many other places. So they have themselves to blame for the spiraling level of distrust,” said a post on Twitter by Kaloy Akhilgov, a lawyer and former government official.
State television largely ignored Tuesday’s gathering in Kemerovo’s central square, focusing instead on Mr. Putin’s visit to a hospital ward and his solemn expressions of condolences.
It also showed him pointing a finger at lowly local officials and strenuously avoiding the question of whether a system addled by corruption might be the real problem.
Despite draconian fire regulations and an army of inspectors to enforce them, Russia has one of the world’s worst fire safety records. Between 2001 and 2015, according to a study by International Association of Fire and Rescue Services, Russia had an average of 7.5 deaths per 100,000 people from fires, compared with 1 in the United States, 2.7 in Kazakhstan and 0.5 in France and Germany. Russia, where fire inspectors are notorious for extorting bribes, had the worst death rate of 41 countries covered by the study.
Mr. Putin made no mention of Russia’s lamentable and well-known fire safety record, but instead expressed puzzled outrage that the shopping mall had gone up in flames and killed so many people.
“What’s happening here?” Mr. Putin said in a highly scripted meeting with Kemerovo officials. “This isn’t war, it’s not a spontaneous methane outburst. People came to relax, children. We’re talking about demography and losing so many people.”
The crowd on the square, however, had no interest in the official script. When Mr. Tsivilev, the deputy governor, announced that a total of 64 deaths had been recorded, one man shouted: “Why are you lying?” A live stream by video service Ruptly showed another clambering onto the platform to confront Mr. Tsivilev.
Instead of calming the throng, the deputy governor only inflamed it by suggesting that some people were exploiting the tragedy to attract attention. This drew a furious retort from Mr. Vostikov, the author of the social media post denouncing corruption.
“I have lost my sister Sabadash Alyona Igorevna; my wife, Vostrikova Elena Sergeevna; three children — five, seven and two years old. I came here for self-promotion, did I?”