Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military commander convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, has died while serving a life sentence in The Hague. His death matters because he was held responsible for some of the gravest atrocities of the Bosnian war, including the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, widely regarded as Europe’s worst mass killing since the Second World War.

Mladic was believed to be 84 and had reportedly suffered several strokes; requests from Serbian officials and his family for his release on health grounds had been rejected. Under his command, Bosnian Serb forces killed about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica and besieged Sarajevo for more than three years, killing thousands through sniper and artillery attacks. The 1992–95 Bosnian war left around 100,000 people dead and 2.2 million displaced, while Mladic’s 2017 conviction was upheld on appeal in 2021.