British troops are looking after each other on a “massive road trip” to Romania as part of a major Nato training exercise.
More than 2,500 British personnel are moving across Europe by land, air and sea to take part in Steadfast Dart, Nato’s largest planned exercise of the year.
The exercise is intended to showcase the alliance’s readiness, capability and commitment to defend Nato territories.
It comes ahead of the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Friday, with much of the exercise taking place in Romania, which borders Ukraine.
Captain Zakariah Ajjane, 29, from Molesey in Surrey, said the troops were looking after each other on the 1,400-mile journey from the UK.
“It’s been really interesting, travelling through several different European countries, basically it’s a massive road trip for us, it’s been quite exciting,” he said.
“(We’ve been) interacting with different countries, different host nations’ police as we go, who have been making sure that we’ve had a smooth journey all the way through.
“It’s been long, that’s the nature of drives such as this, but we’ve been looking after each other.
“You get to know the person you’re sharing a cab with quite well, sharing stories and jokes.”
The captain, who has been in the military for six years and is based in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, oversees a convoy of vehicles which stopped at a Hungarian military base in Szentes on Tuesday morning.
While there, the troops’ vehicles were checked over after their mammoth journey and prepared for their time on exercise in Romania.
Steadfast Dart is the first major deployment of Nato’s Allied Reaction Force (ARF) and the largest planned exercise of 2025, testing the alliance’s ability to deploy under pressure.
British troops set off from Marchwood in Hampshire last week, with around 730 vehicles, including Foxhound patrol and Jackal high mobility weapons platform vehicles, Mastiff armoured patrol vehicles as well as fuel tankers and forklift trucks, fitted onto three ferries at the Sea Mounting Centre.
