Supervisors at a facility for disabled orphans are sentenced to prison after a fire killed 23 in December 2015

Two top officials at a children’s psycho-neurological orphanage in Novokhopersky have been sentenced to time in prison for failing to take the proper safety precautions ahead of a fire in December 2015 that killed 23 people, including several physically disabled patients.

The center’s director, Sergey Nikiforov, was sentenced to two and a half years and the facilities manager, Yuri Dykhnenko, got two years. Investigators argue that most of the deaths could have been avoided if management had installed a fire alarm in the building’s top story and held regular fire drills.

Who cares about some random orphanage?

• Russia has struggled with fire safety, to put it mildly. On March 25, a blaze at a shopping mall in Kemerovo killed 60 people, including 40 children. Meduza correspondent Irina Kravtsova was on the ground, speaking to parents, immediately after that tragedy.
• After Kemerovo, a series of nationwide inspections turned up fire-safety violations at roughly half of all shopping centers in Russia, leading officials to shut down a third of all malls.
• Russia’s problems with protecting children from fires aren’t anything new. In 1961, a schoolhouse in Elbarusovo burned down, killing at least 40 students, and the public didn’t even find out about it until the 1990s. Read Daniil Turovsky’s special report about that event here.