A video going around on the internet wrongly asserts that it shows British tanks gathered in the Estonian capital of Tallinn as part of a NATO strategy to “assault” the Russian city of Saint Petersburg.
One post Sharing the assertion on X has been viewed more than 800,000 times.
It incorrectly states that "NATO has reached Estonia. British troops and their tanks in Tallinn intend to launch an assault on St. Petersburg."
When this article went live, there were no community alerts warning about misinformation present on the post hosted on the platform owned by Elon Musk.
This assertion has gained traction on multiple platforms such as Instagram and Facebook.
Euroverify confirmed that the video actually depicts the British Army's Royal Dragoon Guards in Tallinn on February 24, 2025, during a procession marking Estonia's Independence Day celebration.
More than 1,000 personnel from the Estonian Defence Forces (EDF) along with their NATO allies participated in the yearly military procession commemorating the 107th anniversary of Estonia’s independence.
Cars from the United Kingdom, France, and the United States formed part of the yearly parade.
Euroverify identified the site from the scenes captured at the heart of Tallinn, close to the Estonian Drama Theatre.
The location can be viewed in the image above taken from Google's Street View.
The same address was closed for traffic During the parade to facilitate the movement of tanks.
Upon examining the registration number of the tank featured in the video (DT16AA), it matches a known tank license plate. pictured by The Estonian news agency ERR captured during the Independence Day parade.
According to fact-checkers at Reuters The tank was spotted in Estonia from May to December 2024, demonstrating that they did not “just arrive” in the Baltic nation as some online users suggest.
We can confidently state that the video does not depict a military escalation in Tallinn; instead, it shows a tank being transported via a vehicle after the procession took place in February.
Recently, the video has resurfaced online, coupled with baseless assertions about an uptick in military tensions. This occurred simultaneously as armed forces from seven partner nations, such as the UK and France, participated in joint exercises held in Estonia.
These exercises, known as Operation Hedgehog, form part of NATO’s initiatives to enhance the “cooperation and integration” among allied troops, as stated by the alliance.
The account handling the false report has previously issued groundless accusations regarding an alleged "siege of Saint Petersburg" and consistently circulates Kremlin-friendly, NATO-critical misinformation.
Experts in open-source intelligence have connected the account to the Matryoshka campaign. described as a "coordinated" operation by the French cyber agency.