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A video circulating online falsely claims to show British tanks ammassing in the Estonian capital of Tallinn as part of a NATO plan to “attack” the Russian city of St Petersburg.
One post sharing the claim on X has been seen over 800,000 times.
It wrongly claims that “NATO has arrived in Estonia. British soldiers and tanks in Tallinn plan to attack Saint Petersburg.”
At the time of publication of this article, no community notes cautioning users of the false information was added to the post on the Elon Musk-owned platform.
The same claim has been amplified across several platforms including Instagram and Facebook.
Euroverify found that the footage in fact shows the British Army’s Royal Dragoon Guards in Tallinn on 24 February 2025 as part of a parade to celebrate Estonia’s Independence Day.
Over 1,000 Estonian Defence Forces (EDF) and NATO allied troops took part in that annual military parade to mark the 107th anniversary of Estonia’s independence.
Vehicles from the United Kingdom, France and the United States were part of the annual procession.
Euroverify identified the site of the footage in the centre of Tallinn, near the Estonian Drama Theatre.
The site can be seen in the image above captured from Google’s Street View.
The same address was closed for traffic during the parade to allow for the passage of tanks.
A closer look at the number plate of the tank seen in the video (DT16AA) corresponds to a tank pictured by the Estonian press agency ERR taken during the Independence Day procession.
According to fact-checkers at Reuters, the tank was pictured in Estonia between May and December 2024, proving that they had not “just arrived” in the Baltic country as online users claim.
We can conclude with certainty that the video does not show a military escalation in Tallinn, but rather a tank being loaded onto a vehicle following the procession in February.
The video has been re-circulating in recent weeks, accompanied by unfounded claims of a military escalation, just as troops from seven allied countries, including the UK and France, joined military drills in Estonia.
Those drills, codenamed Exercise Hedgehog, are part of NATO’s efforts to improve the “interoperability and integration” of allied forces, according to the alliance.
The X account responsible for the false claim has made similar unfounded allegations about an impending “siege of Saint Petersburg” and constantly shares anti-NATO, pro-Kremlin disinformation
Open source intelligence experts have linked the account to the Matryoshka campaign, described as a “coordinated” operation by the French cyber agency.
