Mr. Kucherena said Mr. Snowden, who has been following the news about his case intently on his computer in a hotel at the airport, complained to him that such assertions were meant to discredit him and his case, especially at home in the United States.

Only Mr. Snowden knows why he settled on Mr. Kucherena to represent him. But he was one of two lawyers, along with Genri M. Reznik, who attended the airport meeting along with representatives of advocacy groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that have faced harassment from the authorities, especially since Mr. Putin returned to the presidency for a third term last year.

Mr. Snowden selected those who attended from a list drafted at his request by officials from the border police who control access to the transit lounge. Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch, who also attended, described Mr. Kucherena as a capable lawyer who also remained a “staunch loyalist” of the Kremlin.

“He portrays himself and is being portrayed by the Kremlin as an independent actor and one of the pillars of the Russian legal community,” she said, adding that he was “one of those figures whom the Kremlin pushes forward when accused of stifling civil society.”

Mr. Kucherena, who turns 53 next month, is certainly no dissident. Nor is he simply a product of the Soviet legal system, having joined the bar only in 1993. He was born in a tiny village in what is now Moldova and served as a sergeant in the Soviet Union’s strategic rocket forces before moving to Moscow to become an officer of the traffic police. He leveraged that job into acceptance for a correspondence course at the Moscow Legal Institute in 1985, which he completed six years later, just as Russia began its chaotic legal evolution.

He is a prolific author of books and textbooks and often appears as a commentator on television, something exceedingly rare for avowed opponents of Mr. Putin’s authority.

His legal reputation soared when he successfully defended Sergei Lisovsky, an entertainment mogul, after he was arrested during Boris N. Yeltsin’s re-election campaign in 1996 while he and another campaign adviser were carrying a box stuffed with $500,000 in cash out of the presidential administration’s headquarters.