Photo credit: orfonline.org

Ahead of Thursday's informal summit in Nicosia, Christodoulides urged fellow EU leaders to create a clear "playbook" for responding to situations where a member state comes under attack.

For Cyprus, the question is pertinent. Last month a Shahed drone struck a British air base on the island’s southern coast. According to Cypriot officials, the drone was launched from Lebanon – a reminder of the island’s proximity to an increasingly volatile region, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.

At the centre of the discussion is Article 42.7 of the Treaty of European Union, the bloc’s mutual defence clause.

It commits all 27 member states to providing “aid and assistance by all the means in their power” if one of them is the victim of armed aggression.

Article 42.7 has only been invoked once to date – by France, in the aftermath of the 2015 Paris attacks. However, this was in the context of a terrorist attack rather than a conventional state-on-state military attack, and was used by France to request support to combat terrorism.

In terms of a full triggering of the article, Christodoulides said: “We have Article 42.7 and we don’t know what is going to happen if a member state triggers this article."

The aim now, he added, is to “prepare an operational plan” that would set out how such assistance would work in practice.

News.Az 

By Ulviyya Salmanli