NICOSIA — Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides announced in Nicosia that European Union member states will prepare an operational plan in case Article 42.7 of the EU treaties is ever triggered. He made the announcement ahead of an informal EU leaders' summit.

Article 42.7 obliges all 27 member states to assist each other in times of crisis and has never been invoked before. "We have Article 42.7 and we don't know what is going to happen if a member state triggers this article," Christodoulides said. "So we're going to have a discussion and prepare, let's say, an operational plan of what is going to happen in case a member state triggers this article, and there are a number of issues."

He pointed to the overlap between EU and NATO membership as one of the issues requiring clarification. "What is going to happen in this situation if a member state is both NATO member state and an EU member state? What is going happen?" he said. NATO's Article 5 states that an attack on one ally is deemed an attack on all and requires a collective response.

The announcement followed a Shahed drone strike last month on a British air base on Cyprus's southern coastline. Cypriot officials said the drone was launched from Lebanon, whose capital is 207 kilometers from Cyprus's southern coast. Greece, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal dispatched ships with anti-drone capabilities to help defend the island.

The leaders of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan will attend the informal EU leaders' summit. Cyprus's EU presidency prioritizes closer ties to the Middle East, including the Mediterranean Pact, which covers projects on health, education and energy in Middle Eastern countries. "We can represent the interest of the countries of the Greater Middle East to Brussels, but at the same time, and this is very, very important, the countries in the region, they trust Cyprus to represent them in the European Union," he said.

Christodoulides is a proponent of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, and under the Cypriot presidency a "Friends of IMEC" group has been established to promote the initiative. The Great Seas Interconnector, an electricity cable connecting the power grids of Greece and Cyprus and eventually Israel, has been plagued by delays. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will unveil on Friday specific proposals regarding energy costs and how the EU can become more energy independent. He also said the EU had failed to deliver on its pledge to add new members in the last two years but was now deciding at a faster pace.