Fewer than 100 American troops are now left in Estonia. Until the latest rotation ended, the U.S. contingent there ran between 500 and 700, according to Estonian broadcaster ETV.
The departing soldiers had been based mainly at Tapa military base in the north of the country, with others at sites such as Camp Reedo in Võru. Estonian officials said a fresh U.S. rotational unit should arrive later this summer and stay until the end of the year. Nothing is confirmed beyond 2026.
What Tallinn has been told
Defence Minister Hanno Pevkur said the NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe and the Commander of U.S. Army Europe had briefed him on the next rotation. “The next rotation should still move to Estonia during the summer,” he said. How big the unit will be, and what it will be made of, has not been decided.
The bilateral defense agreement between Washington and Tallinn, which has put U.S. troops in Estonia on a rotational basis since 2022, is unchanged, Pevkur said. Future decisions, he added, depend on the Pentagon’s six-month review of U.S. defense policy and force posture in Europe. That review is expected to settle where American forces will be placed across the continent, the Baltic region included.
ETV also reported that the next rotation is tied to sending a new U.S. brigade to Poland, though no timeline exists for that. Earlier rotations to Estonia generally came from brigades based in Poland or Romania. Pevkur said standing up a new brigade in Poland and building rotations from it would take longer than a year, so it is not clear which unit will supply future deployments.
Kalev Stoicescu, who chairs the Estonian Parliament’s National Defence Committee, said the White House makes the call on U.S. forces in Europe, guided by Washington’s strategic interests. If American troops stay on the continent, he said, they belong on NATO’s eastern flank.
Pevkur does not expect a major announcement on the U.S. presence at the coming NATO summit in Ankara. Until long-term decisions come, Estonia will lean on its own defenses and on the NATO battlegroups rotating through the Baltic states.
Cuts elsewhere in Europe
Estonia is not the only place where the numbers are dropping. Lithuania has just seen more than 1,000 U.S. troops and their equipment leave after a scheduled rotation ended. The United States also plans to take roughly 5,000 troops out of Germany over the next six to twelve months, including a combat brigade and a missile unit that had been slated for deployment in Europe.
