MOSCOW — The head of Russia’s coronavirus task force, Tatyana Golikova, assured President Vladimir V. Putin in mid-March that the country was ready to take on the pandemic. From masks to ventilators, she said, Russia’s hospitals had everything they needed to weather the crisis.

“There is no reason at all to panic,” she said.

A week later, the head doctor of one of Moscow’s top hospitals caring for coronavirus patients quietly wrote to a medical charity asking for help. The hospital, he wrote, was in need of “disposable materials and equipment” to continue to serve the critically ill.

“We’re used to always living, somehow, in the unspoken, looking through rose-colored glasses,” said Elena Smirnova, the head of the charity, Sozidaniye. “They can’t hide this anymore.”

[Analysis: Putin, Russia’s man of action, lets others act against the coronavirus]

For weeks, the coronavirus pandemic had the makings of a Kremlin propaganda coup; even as Western countries succumbed one by one, Russia appeared invincible, recording fewer than 100 new cases a day through late March despite its tightly packed cities, global travel connections and 2,600-mile land border with China.