{"id":1195,"date":"2015-02-25T13:04:33","date_gmt":"2015-02-25T13:04:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/box5917.temp.domains\/~iriacom\/\/news\/?p=1195"},"modified":"2015-02-25T13:04:33","modified_gmt":"2015-02-25T13:04:33","slug":"us-and-uk-army-parade-in-estonia-300-meters-from-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/us-and-uk-army-parade-in-estonia-300-meters-from-russia\/","title":{"rendered":"US and UK army parade in Estonia, 300 meters from Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"

NATO member Estonia has held a military parade in border town of Narva, just 300 meters from the Russian border. Tallinn is a long-time critic of Moscow, which it accuses of having an aggressive policy towards the Baltic nation.<\/p>\n

Armored vehicles from the US Army’s Second Cavalry Regiment and British troops were officially taking part in a military parade marking Estonia’s Independence Day, but the choice of location was deeply symbolic.<\/p>\n

Over 140 pieces of NATO military hardware took part in the parade<\/a>, including four US armored personnel carriers M1126 Stryker flying stars-and-stripes. Another foreign nation, the Netherlands, provided four Swedish-made Stridsfordon 90 tracked combat vehicles (designated CV9035NL Mk III by the Dutch).<\/p>\n

\"US-soldiers-in-Estonia\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Estonia also showed off its own howitzers, anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, armored vehicles and other hardware. Over 1,400 troops also marched the streets of Narva.<\/p>\n

The Nato-led parade comes as Russian-backed separatists continue to battle Kiev government troops in eastern Ukraine, with fears rising of a separatist assault on the key coastal city of Mariupol.<\/p>\n

\u201cHistory has taught us that if we do not defend ourselves, nobody else will,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0General Riho Teras, Estonia’s chief of staff, said at the parade.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe events in Ukraine that have kept the entire world awake, demonstrate very clearly that we ourselves must maintain security,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0he added.<\/p>\n

\u201cNarva is a part of NATO no less than New York or Istanbul, and NATO defends every square meter of its territory,\u201d<\/em> Estonian Prime Minister Taavi R\u00f5ivas said in a speech in capital, Tallinn.<\/p>\n

Around 100 Dutch, Spanish, Latvian and Lithuanian troops also marched in the snow alongside some 1,300 Estonian soldiers to mark the independence of the formerly Soviet-ruled republic.<\/p>\n

The city has a large number of ethnic Russians and a strong pro-autonomy movement, with some Estonian politicians fearing that it could be exploited now by Russia to saw dissent.<\/p>\n

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NATO member Estonia has held a military parade in border town of Narva, just 300 meters from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1199,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,1],"tags":[75,6,151,24,5,59,20,7,61],"class_list":["post-1195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe","category-news","tag-conflict","tag-defense","tag-estonia","tag-eu","tag-military","tag-nato","tag-russia","tag-u-s","tag-uk"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/US-UK-Parade-in-Estonia.jpg?fit=685%2C361&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7jJWb-jh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1195"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1213,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195\/revisions\/1213"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}