Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb military commander who was convicted of genocide and sentenced to life imprisonment for some of the worst atrocities in Europe since the Second World War, has died in prison in The Hague. He was 84. The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals — the UN body that oversees the legacy of international war crimes courts — confirmed his death and announced that a full inquiry into the circumstances had been ordered.

Mladić was the commanding general of the Bosnian Serb army during the 1992–95 Bosnian War, a conflict that killed more than 100,000 people and displaced over a million. He was found guilty by a UN tribunal in 2017 of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and his conviction was upheld on appeal in 2021. His most notorious crime was the mass killing of at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995 — a town in eastern Bosnia that had been designated a United Nations safe area. After Dutch UN peacekeepers withdrew, Mladić's forces rounded up the town's male population, executed them and buried their bodies in mass graves. He had also overseen the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital, during which relentless artillery and sniper fire killed approximately 10,000 civilians. Arrested in Serbia in 2011 after 16 years as a fugitive, Mladić had suffered a series of strokes and was hospitalised in The Hague when he died. His son had spoken publicly about his declining health in recent weeks, and a UN doctor had warned his death could come at any time. Serbia's government had repeatedly requested his release so he could receive care in Belgrade; those requests were denied.

Reactions to his death laid bare the profound and unresolved divisions that his crimes left across the western Balkans. For survivors and victims' families, there was grief mixed with bitterness. Munira Subašić of the Mothers of Srebrenica association said that while a major war criminal had died, the pain endured by victims' families had not — and that many Bosnian Serbs continued to deny or minimise the genocide. Camil Durakovic, a survivor who fled Srebrenica on foot in 1995 and later became the town's mayor, said the most bitter feeling was that Mladić had lived to old age while thousands of his victims had not.

In Serbia, the response was sharply split along political lines. Pro-government media and nationalist politicians mourned Mladić as a hero, with some claiming he had been