Vladimir Putin has blamed criminal negligence for Russia’s deadliest fire in nearly a decade, as he sought to manage his first crisis since he was re-elected by a landslide earlier this month.

At least 64 people died in the fire that engulfed the top floor of the Winter Cherry shopping centre in the Siberian city of Kemerovo on Sunday. Some victims jumped from windows to escape the flames and smoke.

Official lists of the dead released by Kemerovo authorities showed that at least 40 of the 64 were children – the fire had swept through a children’s play area and two cinemas.

The Russian president arrived on Tuesday to find anger at officials’ handling of the tragedy. Tempers flared over reports that fire alarms at the shopping centre did not work and that emergency exit doors had been locked. A member of Russia’s parliament suggested corruption was to blame. Under public pressure, Putin declared Wednesday a day of national mourning.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People rally in central Kemerovo in the aftermath of the fire Photograph: TASS / Barcroft Images

Thousands of residents congregated in a central square in Kemerovo on Tuesday in a rare public demonstration in the capital of a coal-mining region in western Siberia. Some called for Putin to come to the square, or for the resignation of the local government. Riot police were deployed around the local administration building.

In one confrontation, Sergey Tsivilyev, a vice-governor for the region, accused a protester of “making PR of the tragedy”. The man, Igor Vostrikov, responded by saying he had lost three young children, his wife and his sister in the blaze.

The protests went on for more than 10 hours. Vigils were planned in other cities, with the government seeking to take the lead. After activists in Moscow said they planned to meet at 7pm on Tuesday, the mayor’s office announced an official vigil at 5pm that one activist called a “spoiler event”.

Similar tragedies and natural disasters in Russia have grown into political crises. The Kursk submarine disaster, in which 118 sailors died in 2000, has dogged Putin for years after his terse response in to the question of what happened: “It sank,” he told Larry King Live at the time.

In 2010, Putin publicly chastised the head of a mine in the Kemerovo region after an explosion caused the death of 66 people. The mining boss soon resigned, although local officials went largely unpunished.



It is still unclear what, if any, the repercussions will come of the fire at a privately owned shopping centre hundreds of miles from the Russian capital.



On Tuesday, Aman Tuleyev, the governor of Kemerovo region since 1997, claimed there were only 200 people at the demonstration in Kemerovo city and that none were relatives of the deceased.

In a high-level meeting, Tuleyev apologised to Putin for the tragedy and then said his main task was not to allow opposition unrest as a result of the fire.

“My task is not to allow what is happening,” the governor said in remarks that were stricken from the Kremlin’s published transcript of the meeting. “Speculating with lies based on other people’s grief to achieve who knows what aims. Actually we all know what they want.”



There was deep scepticism toward official information in the city on Tuesday, with rumours that the number of dead was far higher than officially reported. There have also been media reports that law enforcement officers seized video and photographic equipment from those who recorded footage of the fire.

On Monday, Russia’s main federal investigating authority, the Investigative Committee, appeared to confirm reports that relatives of the dead were being asked to sign nondisclosure agreements.

“The signing of these kinds of documents is provided for in criminal legislation and dictated above all in the interests of the victims,” the committee wrote on Telegram, a popular messenger app.

Putin visited the scene of the fire on Tuesday and laid flowers at a makeshift memorial to the dead. As well as meeting members of the regional government, he met law enforcement officials and local members of a citizens’ action group.

“What’s happening here? 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. Why? Because of some criminal negligence, because of slovenliness. How could this ever happen?” he said during a meeting of ministers in Kemerovo.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russian emergency service staff work at the site of the fire Photograph: Dmitry Serebryakov/AFP/Getty Images

The head of the Investigative Committee said the fire alarm system in the shopping centre had been out of order since 19 March and a security guard had not turned on the public address system to warn people to evacuate the building.

News reports on state-run television said on Monday that young children had called relatives from the burning shopping centre. “Tell my mother that I loved her,” one young girl told her aunt, according to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. “Tell everyone that I loved them.”

“We are burning,” another young woman wrote on the social network VK. “This may be goodbye.”

The fire was the deadliest since 158 people died from a blaze at a club in the Siberian city of Perm in 2009.