Twelve British soldiers were injured in a major traffic pile-up in Estonia, near the border with Russia, local media have reported.
The incident is understood to have happened on the afternoon of Friday, November 22, amid snowy conditions, Sky News reports.
At the time of the crash, the troops were heading back to the Tapa Army base – the largest in the Baltic nation – in three Toyota minibuses.
Two civilian cars driven by Estonians are believed to have been involved in a collision which triggered a chain reaction, resulting in the military vehicles and another civilian car piling into each other.
Alongside the 12 troops, five civilians were also injured and taken to hospital, according to the Estonian Postimees news site.
On Sunday, eight of the soldiers involved in the crash were flown back to the UK for hospital treatment. Five of them have since been discharged, while three remain in the military wing of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham.
The troops are part of an important NATO mission – Operation Cabrit – aimed at deterring Russian attacks against the Baltic nation and the eastern flank of the Western military alliance.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence said: “Several British soldiers deployed on Operation CABRIT in Estonia were injured in a road traffic incident last Friday, 22nd November. Following hospital treatment in Estonia, eight personnel were flown back to the UK on an RAF C-17 for further treatment.
“Five have since been discharged and three are being cared for at the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham. We wish them all a speedy recovery.”
Estonia is on the frontline of the Russian hybrid offensive against the West, as denounced earlier this year by its officials, and has ramped up its military to deter military attacks from an increasingly aggressive Kremlin.
In light of reports of Ukraine firing British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles into the Kursk region and of US President Joe Biden‘s decision to give the go-ahead to Kyiv to target the Russian territory with ATACMS, Moscow has issued several thinly veiled nuclear threats to the West.