Well, of course Avangard has a really hot re-entry speed. But so does any other ballistic warhead. And yes, Avangard is capable of maneuvering, since it’s fitted with winglets. But that’s actually a very old idea — to fit a ballistic rocket with wings so it will be capable of atmospheric maneuvering. It was first tried in 1944 by Wernher von Braun with some of his Nazi V-2 rockets. It’s a dead end. At extreme speed, and with a warhead on a ballistic re-entry course, whatever you gain in maneuverability, you lose in precision.

It goes without saying that Avangard is capable of striking United States territory, and that it can’t be successfully intercepted. But so what? That’s true of any Russian I.C.B.M.

Another of Mr. Putin’s wunderwaffen is the Zirkon missile, a hypersonic ship killer with a 250-mile range. It’s hard to say what it’s like: Every time Russian officials boast about it, they post a photo of America’s hypersonic Boeing X52 Waverider.

A hypersonic ship killer hurtling at eight times the speed of sound certainly looks impressive in video games. But the harsh reality of a high-tech war is a tad different.

Traditionally, there have been two different approaches to ship killers. The United States Navy opted for its slow, subsonic, sea-skimming but hard-to-detect Harpoon.

The Soviet Union chose supersonic missiles. It was really good at producing scramjets and ramjets. In fact, that was one of the few fields where the Soviets were at the top of the game.

Ramjets are jet engines that don’t need a turbine and a compressor, relying on the sheer volume of air pushed through it by the speed it develops. In that way they resemble the pulsejets that powered Nazi Germany’s V-1 “buzz bomb,” which was employed to terrify the British in World War II but only heightened their resolve. It was launched from a rail at a speed of about 370 miles per hour.