European leaders and international observers have sharply condemned the funeral of Ratko Mladic, the convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal, held on Monday in Belgrade, with experts describing the event as a state-sponsored glorification that raises serious questions about Serbia's commitment to reconciliation and its aspirations to join the European Union.

Mladic, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, died on 27 August at the age of 84 at the UN Detention Unit in Scheveningen, the Netherlands, where he was serving a life sentence handed down by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2017. He had been convicted of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, including his direct responsibility for the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995 — the worst mass killing on European soil since the Second World War — and for orchestrating the years-long siege of Sarajevo. Despite his convictions, Mladic retained a significant following in Serbia, where banners reading