EUROPEAN Union defence ministers agreed to boost “military mobility” and strengthen the bloc’s ability to deploy co-ordinated military force quickly from the Mediterranean to north Africa at today’s Zagreb summit.

The meeting, chaired by EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy Josep Borrell conducted a “strategic review” of the bloc’s Permanent Structured Co-operation (Pesco), an accord working towards a unified European military which former European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker called “the sleeping beauty of the Lisbon Treaty.”

It also assessed the deployment of naval forces to the Mediterranean aimed at enforcing an arms embargo on Libya and discussed the French-led military deployment to Mali, which is ostensibly directed at suppressing terrorism, though French forces based there have been accused of assisting Libyan rebel General Khalifa Haftar.