Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a national state of emergency over 20,000 tons of spilled diesel fuel in Siberia, an action that the government hasn’t taken during the coronavirus pandemic. Photo: Marine Rescue Service/AFP/Getty Images (Originally Published June 5, 2020) MOSCOW—The Russian mining company that saw a massive fuel leak at one of its Arctic installations in May is refusing to pay some $2 billion in damages sought by the Russian government to cover the cleanup, and has questioned how the figure was calculated. At least 20,000 tons of fuel seeped from a holding tank at a power plant run by a subsidiary of Norilsk Nickel, or Nornickel, contaminating a swath of land and several ecologically important bodies of water in what the Russian branch of environmental group Greenpeace called…