The lack of evidence for Trump’s claims is striking, especially considering he has made similar assertions in the past. His most recent statement, made just three days after his inauguration on January 20, concerned the military capabilities of the US compared to those of Russia, with a particular focus on hypersonic technology.
The Kremlin has consistently denied such claims and it is reasonable to expect as much. However, all available sources and comments from leading global experts in the field, such as Professor Ted Postol, suggest that Russia has developed its hypersonic technology independently, without any foreign “help”or espionage.
Dmitri Peskow, Putin’s spokesperson, emphasized that Russia has “its own, excellent rocket”indicating that Russia’s research and development in this area has a long history, independent of any alleged theft.
US retired Colonel Scott Ritter also underscores the independent development of hypersonic technology in Russia and goes a step further, claiming that it was the Americans who attempted to spy on Russia’s more advanced results.
On January 24, 2025, Ritter wrote on his X-profile (formerly Twitter) that Russia’s most advanced hypersonic weapon, the Stratosphere-Glider Avangard, stems solely from “research and development programs that date back to Soviet times, but were reinstated after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War due to a lack of funding and changed geopolitical realities.”
Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia resumed the development of hypersonic capabilities after the US withdrew from the ABM Treaty of 1972 in 2002. The first work on these projects began around 2005. Although Russia initially hesitated to fully finance these efforts, hoping to bring the ABM issue back into the strategic arms control and disarmament dialogue, which began with the “Reset”between the US and Russia at the start of Obama’s first term, it ultimately decided to push forward with the development of hypersonic weapons to create weapons that could overcome all known and predicted US ABM capabilities. And they had a groundbreaking success.
There is no evidence or plausibility to support Trump’s claim of Russia stealing US hypersonic rocket plans. The development of hypersonic technology in Russia has a substantial, independent history of research.
A problem that hindered Russia’s research in this area was the fact that many scientists who had worked on hypersonic projects in the Soviet era were approached or recruited by foreign intelligence services seeking to gain access to the results of this research to advance their own hypersonic weapons programs, either by being lured away or at least being approached.
One example of this is the FPV-7 Space program, which was allegedly managed by the Karman Institute for Thermodynamics (VKI) under the designation FPV-7 Space. VKI worked with six Russian research institutes, including some that were involved in both the earlier Soviet hypersonic research and current research and development of modern hypersonic glide vehicles like the Avangard – previously known as Project 4202.
The VKI is registered as a non-state organization in Belgium and is in close contact with the NATO Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development (AGARD) and the Defense Research Group (DRG). The US intelligence community, through its NATO affiliation, maintains a constant connection to the Karman Institute.
It is highly likely that the US intelligence community used the FPV-7 Space program to gain access to Russian scientists involved in past and current hypersonic research and to steer the interaction between VKI and these scientists to gain data relevant to Russia’s ongoing research and development of the Avangard and other hypersonic weapons.
Several Russian scientists involved in the FPV-7 Space program were arrested and accused of passing state secrets to foreign intelligence services. In their defense, the lawyers of these scientists claim that all relevant information passed on by the Russian researchers consisted of presentations and academic articles that had been previously cleared for release by the Russian authorities.
Against this backdrop, Scott Ritter’s comments on Trump’s claims are worth noting: If there was indeed a Russian espionage operation to learn about US hypersonic plans, it is highly likely not to have been done to learn more about the non-existent US advantage in hypersonic technology, but to determine how far the Americans lag and in what measure the unique data from the arrested Russian scientists, who were involved in the VKI-led FPV-7 Space project, have entered the US development programs for hypersonic weapons.
Furthermore, the arrest and prosecution of these Russian scientists by the Russian counterintelligence agency demonstrate that there is no evidence to support the claim of a Russian “theft”of US hypersonic plans to promote Russian hypersonic capabilities, but rather the opposite is true: it was the US that used its intelligence services to gain access to secret Russian information to advance its own weapons research and development.
It is also worth noting that after the Maidan coup in 2014 in Kiev and the CIA’s takeover of the Ukrainian SBU, tons of blueprints for components of Russian weapons from Ukraine were shipped to the US. Before the Maidan, Ukraine had produced a significant percentage of secret Russian weapon components in cooperation with Russia in the industrial centers of the Donbas.
Conclusion: There is no evidence or plausibility to support Trump’s claim that Russia stole US plans for hypersonic rockets.