The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987 by the United States and the Soviet Union, eliminated an entire class of weapons: ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km. It said nothing about sea-launched or air-launched systems, which is why the Tomahawk survived on warships while its land-based cousin did not. The United States announced withdrawal in 2019, citing Russian non-compliance, and the treaty lapsed in August of that year. Development of a ground-launched mid-range system followed almost immediately, and Typhon is the result: the naval launch cell put on a trailer. Every subsequent deployment therefore carries a second meaning beyond its military one, because each is a visible demonstration that the constraint is gone. That is the frame in which Moscow's protest should be read, and it is also why the first Philippine deployment in 2024 drew such a sharp reaction from Beijing.

Geography does the work here. A road-mobile launcher with roughly 1,600 km of reach, sited in the Japanese archipelago, covers the Russian Far East including Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands as well as substantial parts of the Chinese coast, and being containerised and dispersible it is far harder to target than a fixed base. Russia's objection that even a temporary exercise deployment is unacceptable reflects the practical reality that an exercise proves the deployment is feasible, and that what can be brought in for three weeks can be brought back. The episode also sits on top of an unresolved dispute: Russia and Japan have never signed a post-war peace treaty because of the competing claim to the southern Kuril Islands, which Japan calls the Northern Territories. For India, the significance is comparative rather than direct, as this is the clearest live example of how the collapse of an arms-control treaty translates into new hardware on somebody's territory.