Now suppose that each vw-disconnecting set of minimum size k consists only of edges that are all incident to v or or all incident to w; for example, in Fig.28.1, the set E2 is such a vw-disconnecting set. We can assume without loss of generality that each edge of G is contained in a vw-disconnecting set of size k, since otherwise its removal would not affect the value of k and we could use the induction hypothesis to obtain k edge-disjoint paths. If P is path from v to w, then P must consist of either one or two edges, and can thus contain at most one edge of any vw-disconnecting set of size k. By removing from G the edges of P, we obtain a graph with at least k-1 edge-disjoint paths, by the induction hypothesis. These paths, together with P, give the required k paths in G.