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Generalizing and unifying earlier results of W. Mader, and A. Frank and B. Jackson, we prove two splitting theorems concerning mixed graphs. By invoking these theorems we obtain min-max formulae for the minimum number of new edges to be added to a mixed graph so that the resulting graph satisfies local edge-connectivity prescriptions. An extension of Edmonds’s theorem on disjoint arborescences is also deduced along with a new sufficient condition for the solvability of the edge-disjoint paths problem in digraphs. The approach gives rise to strongly polynomial algorithms for the corresponding optimization problems.