Starting on Monday May 19 the largest exercise of the Estonian Defence Forces this year, SIIL 2025, will enter the live fire phase.
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Press Release, Tallinn, 18 May 2025: [auto-translated] Starting on Monday, May 19, the largest exercise of the Estonian Defence Forces this year, SIIL 2025, will enter the live fire phase, marking the end of the most intensive part of the exercise, during which thousands of reservists practised their wartime tasks in training battles with the rest of the exercise participants. Over the weekend, maintenance of equipment, weapons and equipment has taken place for all participants in the exercise, after which most of the reservists have been separated from their units and returned to civilian life.
“The purpose of organising the exercises is to assess the readiness of units, consolidate strengths, identify bottlenecks and eliminate them. Exercise SIIL enabled all of this, clearly showing us the high readiness of the units of the Defence Forces and the Defence League to begin performing tasks and overcome emerging obstacles,” said the Commander of the Defence Forces, Major General Andrus Merilo. “A special value of exercise SIIL 2025 was the involvement of Ukrainian drone experts and the target unit Kullisilm, which brought the latest skills and capabilities from the Ukrainian battlefields to the Estonian exercise. It is good to see that Estonian and allied units were able to offer each other a number of challenges during SIIL. At the same time, many different learning points emerged during the exercise, from which conclusions can be drawn for the further development of training.”
The main focus of the fifth SIIL exercise is to practice the implementation of key tasks of Estonian and regional defence plans in cooperation with allies, as well as to test the combat readiness of the Estonian Defence Forces, the Estonian Defence League and allied units. During the exercise, the reservists were reminded of what they had previously learned, practised cooperation between units, and were introduced to the new equipment and weapons of the Estonian Defence Forces. The main units to be evaluated in this year’s exercise are the 1st Infantry Brigade of the Estonian Division and the units assigned to the Estonian Defence League’s Northeast Land Defence District.
After the most active phase of the training battles on the terrain, which took place from May 13 to 16, and which was attended by over 16,000 fighters, including Estonian reservists, conscripts, members of the Estonian Defence League and active military personnel, as well as soldiers from allied countries, the units have summarised the initial feedback from the participants, tidied up the exercise areas and headed back to their unit’s permanent location.
On Monday, designated units of the Estonian Defence Forces and the armed forces of allied countries will continue with live fire exercises, which will take place between May 19 and 23, mainly at the Defence Forces’ central training ground, but also at the Nursipalu training ground and Rutja.
The Estonian Defence Forces General Staff, division headquarters and divisional units, as well as the Cyber Command, Support Command, Navy and Air Force, Special Operations Command, Defence Intelligence Centre, Military Police, Defence Forces Academy and Defence League will participate in the international exercise SIIL 2025. The NATO Battle Group in Estonia and the NATO Forward-deployed Staff Element in Estonia will also be represented in the exercise. Allied and partner countries participating in the exercise are the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, the United States and Canada, in addition to representatives as observers or instructors from Japan, Israel and Ukraine.
Exercise SIIL 2025 is taking place as part of the larger NATO exercise STEADFAST DETERRENCE 25, during which the NATO Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum ( JFCBS ) in Brunssum, the Netherlands, practices planning and conducting deterrence and defence operations at the strategic and operational levels. In addition, SIIL 2025 is a preparatory exercise for the participation of the Estonian division in the North-East Corps regional planning exercise GRIFFIN LIGHTNING 25.
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