We prove that there exist functions $f,g:\mathbb{ N}\to\mathbb{ N}$ such that for all nonnegative integers $k$ and $d$, for every graph $G$, either $G$ contains $k$ cycles such that vertices of different cycles have distance greater than $d$ in $G$, or there exists a subset $X$ of vertices of $G$ with $|X|\leq f(k)$ such that $G-B_G(X,g(d))$ is a forest, where $B_G(X,r)$ denotes the set of vertices of $G$ having distance at most $r$ from a vertex of $X$.
Categories: math.CO cs.DM