Whenever a country, like the US, deals with an adversarial entity, for this case Russia, the automatic assumption is that whatever propaganda is released is spiced, if not entirely packed, with complete lies.
Take the Snowden question for Putin. Snowden asked about surveillance practices in Russia, and of course Putin denied that they were anything as close to the programs in the US. Putin also said that Russian law would not permit any organization to act like the NSA does.
To this question and answer, the US administration and much of the media have called Snowden a stooge of Putin’s, while insinuating that Russia does much worse things than what the NSA does. Whether the US is correct or not does not matter, because the US/Russia adversarial position requires that they both say the other is lying, or severely under-representing actual practices. Because of this, both could be lying, or both could be telling the truth, or some variance in-between.
Either way a rational person must look at all the information, and then figure out which they believe. The Russians will always believe the Americans who agree with the Russian world view, and Americans will always believe the Russians who agree with America’s.
Somewhere between Russia’s and America’s propaganda there is truth, the difficulty comes in determining which truth to believe.