Vladimir Putin ordered a special Kremlin inquiry into the three tragedies to hit Russia since the weekend, Reuters news agency reported.

A plane crash, mine disaster and retirement home fire have claimed nearly 200 lives at three separate locations across the country in a matter of days, highlighting the country’s lax safety standards and strained emergency services.

Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov will lead the high-level probe into the incidents and see if any lessons can be drawn from them.

“You have to do your best to investigate the reasons at the highest level and to draw corresponding conclusions,” said Putin, speaking at a military commission meeting where a minute’s silence was held for those who died in the disasters.

Putin has been criticized for being slow to issue a public response to past tragedies, including the 2000 Kursk submarine sinking in which 118 sailors died and the 2004 Beslan school siege that killed more than 300 people.

But he was quick to show empathy with the victims of the latest accidents.

“The information about this terrible tragedy at the Ulyanovskaya mine echoes in the hearts of Russians with pain,” said Putin in a message of condolence.

The president also expressed his pain at the death of the elderly people, promising an examination of the anti-fire protection systems in the building.

The role of the emergency services has already been raised in relation to the crash of an ageing commercial jet in Samara at the weekend. Although just six of the 57 people on board perished, survivors told of being strapped upside down in the wreckage for 20 minutes before they were rescued.

Although emergency teams were quick to the site of the mine accident in the Kemerovo region of Siberia, it was too late to help at least 106 miners, managers and a visiting British geologist who died in the methane explosion deep under ground.

The regional prosecutor’s office there has already opened its own inquiry, suspecting breaches of mining rules were to blame for the tragedy in one of the country’s most modern coal mines.

In the third incident, 62 residents and staff at a retirement home died in a fire in a remote village in the South of the country in the Krasnodar region, mostly from suffocation. It took nearly an hour for emergency services to reach the scene, more than 50 km (30 miles) from the nearest large town.

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