I believe that it has to do with the image Putin tries to portray, and what the actual reality is.
This is an aside, but a huge problem with just about all journalism worldwide is that, due to the advent of 24 hour technology availability, most journalism has been replaced with varying experts giving opinions. What this means is that to truly figure out what is going on and cut through the bullshit, you need to rely on local sources and local news. For all the crap that it gets (and it deserves a lot of crap), Twitter is actually very good at allowing a local source to gain a small, but global audience.
Some of the folks I've seen on the ground in Russia tell that it's actually worse than we think. Huge inflation issues, food shortages in certain places, Saturday morning cartoon levels of corruption leading to some horrific inefficiencies, the lack of any real unifying vision of Russia after Putin, the disastrous population crisis (the Russians are literally dying out as a people), the various hardened criminals who are allied with one another only due to Putin keeping them fabulously rich at the expense of the Russian people. These are just a few examples.
Russia is very similar to Venezuela in that it's essentially a kleptocracy. Only this state has thousands of nuclear warheads.