Vladimir Putin has turned experimental weapons into a key part of Russia’s deterrence and propaganda strategy, but the gap between rhetoric and reality reveals systemic challenges in engineering, scientific collaboration, and strategic credibility. Putin loves his weapons, and he loves even more talking about the latest developments in high profile televised events. Russia’s theatrical and choreographed use of a nominally new IRBM missile against Ukraine served multiple audiences, both domestic and foreign, and fits a pattern Putin started in the 2010s as Russia’s experimental work on missiles gained higher political salience for the Kremlin.
During the 2018 Federal Assembly, Putin, in addition to focusing on families and the economy, spent more time on any other topic than new experimental strategic weapons Russia was working on.
Experimental weapons — and hypersonic weapons in particular — are politically enticing. They can serve as a barometer of national power. Particularly in the current environment, where the Russian army continues to struggle in taking the rest of Donetsk Oblast, Putin can use them to claim on the global stage that Russia still maintains technological superiority and military prowess. This is important signaling for both internal audiences and the incoming Donald Trump administration. It may even provide some comfort to Mr. Putin’s own self conception as a world leader to be contended with.
Despite this, going back to 2018, Putin’s speeches on the subject of experimental weapons are filled with exaggerations. For example, the focus on the Kinzhal missile being «hypersonic», when all ballistic missiles reach hypersonic speeds. Despite this, the presentation resulted in major American newspapers running stories about it. The New York Times, dedicated Page 1 to the headline «Putin’s ‘Invincible’ Missile Is Aimed at U.S. Vulnerabilities». The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, ran with «Putin Unveils Nuclear Weapons He Claims Could Breach U.S. Defenses».
The 2024 attack on Dnipro likewise resulted in breathless coverage, and demonstrated a use-case for experimental weapons that 2018 did not provide. But for all the bluster that these weapons are «hypersonic» and the implied threats of use against NATO, Russia faces immense challenges in developing and introducing complex new weapons systems. Russia’s ability to build and retain talent in engineering and experimental research will be a decisive factor in whether Russia is able to deliver on Putin’s threats and promises.
By personally attaching himself to these weapons and their supposed deterrence value, Putin has made these weapons politically salient. Yet their success, and the success of Russia’s deterrence strategy against Western support for Ukraine, is still reliant on Russia’s engineers and scientists rising to the occasion under intensely difficult conditions — undermining his arguments and leading to a strong element of bluffing in messaging from Russia, and from Putin in particular.
Because of the civilian applications of the technologies in question, particularly in relation to hypersonic flight, there is a great deal of open literature from academics in Russia and elsewhere on the scientific and engineering bottlenecks of these types of weapons. It cannot be wholly discounted that Russian engineers have overcome these problems in secret and classified publications. That said, openly available data, and a lack of data in the form of successful flight tests, points to issues hampering the very scientists and engineers Russia needs to fulfill Putin’s demands.
Undermining Russia’s Scientific Community
Of the weapons systems Putin announced in 2018, only one has been used in combat operations in Ukraine. That live fire test of a nominally unkillable, non-interceptable weapon famously was intercepted by a Patriot missile battery over Kyiv in 2023. The Kinzhal, whose external features and flight pattern are more similar to the older ground-launched Iskander than a glide vehicle, is used semi-regularly as part of attacks on Ukraine, but until November 2024, no other «new» missile weapons developed under Putin had actually been used in the conflict.
One factor in this is the hollowing out of Russia’s leading scientists on the subject of hypersonic flight in hunts for foreign traitors. Viktor Kudryatsev, an internationally recognized and published Russian expert on hypersonic flight, was arrested in 2018 on charges of treason. The treason charges were related to fully public research conducted in the early 2010s on heat shielding applicable to hypersonic glide vehicles with European colleagues; he was arrested by Russia’s security services for his collaborations with foreign scientists. This arrest occurred despite the fact these same collaborations were fully licit and some of which were partially funded by Russian institutions focused on hypersonic flight research — such as the Khristianovich Institute in Novosibirsk according to publicly available records.
Arresting Russian scientists like Mr. Kudrayatsev, who worked on some of the most pressing issues of hypersonic flight — namely, the designs and materials to prevent a hypersonic vehicle from melting itself during flight — sends a chilling signal to Russia’s scientific community. Access to foreign colleagues, and complex foreign computer programs able to simulate a hypersonic vehicle in flight, could actually help Russia overcome key bottlenecks in material and engine design. As a dual-use technology applicable to civilian space flight as much as weapons research, Russia’s growing isolation will impede the further development of these programs over the long term.
Hypersonic flight in particular presents several acute engineering challenges. One, of just many, is the structural integrity of these vehicles under intense heat and pressure of MAch 5+ flight. Equally difficult is the ability to guide these vehicles to target at massive speed. Generally, disturbances in air pressure can lead to rockets and missiles going off-course. This can be corrected with navigation assistance by satellites. But as we know from dozens of public reports, Russia’s missile navigation computers rely overwhelmingly on commercial technologies from the West. Adapting these to operate under hypersonic flight conditions, would be an impressive feat. There is also the issue of the extremely bespoke engines to propel the vehicles under intense conditions. This latter issue may be less of a concern due to how much basic research was done on these engines. But this belies the fact that these are all issues leading U.S. researchers and Russian scientists have articulated and struggled with for decades.
One of the ways engineers can keep research and development costs on these engineering challenges is through the use of modeling software. Computational fluid dynamics, which lets scientists test the intense heat, shockwaves and boundary-layer dynamics which could destroy an expensive test vehicle in flight. Politically speaking, the ability to test in computers beforehand lowers the chances of high-profile embarrassments associated with failed tests. However, open data shows us that Russian engineers, including those involved in hypersonic flight research, rely on foreign software which can be used to model these processes. In fact, one RAN lab is on record using Ansys, a family of modeling software used for hypersonic flight research. Russian entities who work on military engines are also on record using similar Western modeling software, (as are Chinese weapons laboratories).
Russia has claimed to have made real progress in the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle. In fact, Russian officials claim that the vehicle has been deployed to nuclear rocket troops in Orenburg. The history of lying by Russian officials, and systematic challenges, means that when Russia does announce the fielding of true hypersonic vehicles like Avangard, there are doubts as to the feasibility of their widespread adoption without great costs. In the era of ongoing land war in Ukraine, the funding picture for further development of high-end systems vs rearmament of less sophisticated systems in more daily use could be in question.
Failure Will Not Be Televised
Short of embarrassing leaks, such as the accident which killed several Russian nuclear scientists during a test of Burevestnik in 2019, there is a huge gap in our open source understanding of the most experimental systems. The huge gap in data is a function of the fact that testing failures and debacles will not receive the propaganda accolades, and subsequent press coverage. By making these experimental weapons a loud and politically salient part of Russia’s deterrence strategy any kind of embarrassing failures, reflective of the actual state of the program or not, invites miscalculation.
This miscalculation can come from both Russian decision makers and Western decision makers. Nobel Laureate Dmitri Muratov has famously argued that the belief in their own propaganda was one reason Russian decision makers started the war in the first place. Miscalculation on the Russian side is obviously less likely to occur if Putin and the people around him know they are lying about the state of Russia’s scientific and engineering progress towards mass fielding of these weapons and are bluffing on their willingness to use the most recent batch against NATO, as Putin has implied in a televised address.
Some might argue the propaganda has short-term benefits for domestic morale or international bargaining power with the new Trump administration. Given Donald Trump’s noted own fascination with powerful weapons it may even serve as a successful gambit. Time will tell, but despite the televised bluster, posturing, and diplomatic messaging there are serious technical, engineering, and other practical concerns to consider when assessing the threats of Putin’s latest Wunderwaffe.
