Public fury over deaths in mall fire

Putin calls tragedy result of ‘criminal negligence’

MOSCOW — At the end of a month that has seen him unveil new “invincible” missiles, announce a mission to Mars and secure a sky-high vote in Russia’s election, President Vladimir Putin faced a grim reality on the ground Tuesday: a nation enraged by the deaths of children trapped in a burning mall in Siberia.

Putin traveled to the town of Kemerovo to lay flowers next to a makeshift memorial for the at least 64 people, many of them children, who died in the fire Sunday. Some of the children died as they banged on locked exit doors and screamed for help from their parents over cellphones.

“How could this ever happen?” Putin asked local officials.

Public anger at the fire — and claims that official bungling and corruption played a part — drowned out the Kremlin’s fury over Monday’s expulsion of Russian diplomats by 23 countries. Even on state-controlled television, news about the fire pushed aside routine denunciations of the West just as four more countries ordered out diplomats over a nerve agent attack for which London has blamed Moscow.

Putin’s comforting words in Siberia, where he harangued officials and visited the memorial, had to compete with a rival narrative of corruption spread on social media and on the website of Alexei Navlny, the anti-corruption campaigner who was barred from running in the March 18 election against Putin.

That Russia is far from being a monolithic one-party state, despite Putin’s lopsided re-election, was clear Tuesday evening in the two events organized to mourn the dead in Kemerovo.

One was state-sponsored, near the Kremlin; the other was held in Pushkin Square, by Muscovites who wanted no part in the official gathering.

Putin set the security apparatus to work, telling relatives of the victims that the Investigative Committee, Russia’s answer to the FBI, had deployed 100 investigators and would find those responsible for the fire and punish them.

He blamed “criminal negligence” and “slovenliness” for the blaze.

Putin avoided mention of what many believe was the real cause of the fire: a state system, including multiple agencies responsible for limiting fire and other risks, eaten away by corruption and incompetence.