# Ratko Mladić given military funeral in Belgrade despite EU alarm
*Event date: 2026-09-07*
Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb general convicted of genocide and war crimes, has been buried in Belgrade with military honours after a ceremony that drew thousands of mourners and immediate condemnation from the European Union.
According to The Guardian, Mladić died in prison in late August at the age of 84 while serving a life sentence. His funeral in the Serbian capital was anything but subdued. His coffin was flown to Serbia on a government plane, draped in national flags and carried from the aircraft by uniformed soldiers. On Monday morning, people gathered outside a small church to pay their respects, with armed forces standing guard beside the casket.
The burial took on the tone of a state event even though Serbian officials stopped short of formally calling it one. Military honours included a three-volley rifle salute at the cemetery. The ceremony also drew support from the Serbian Orthodox Church, whose patriarch, Porfirije, said Mladić’s name would remain deeply etched in the memory and prayers of many Serbian Orthodox believers.
The ceremony is politically explosive because Mladić is not merely a controversial wartime figure. He was found guilty in 2017 for his role in the Srebrenica massacre, in which about 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were killed after Bosnian Serb forces captured the UN-designated enclave. He was also central to the siege of Sarajevo and the wider policy of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war, which killed more than 100,000 people and displaced more than 2 million.
That history is why Brussels reacted so strongly. EU enlargement commissioner Marta Kos canceled a planned visit to Serbia and said the glorification of Mladić was incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built. An EU spokesperson echoed the warning, saying that glorification of war criminals, genocide denial and revisionism have no place in the EU or in candidate countries.
The funeral also landed in the middle of Serbia’s domestic political tension. President Aleksandar Vučić has long tried to balance EU accession with close ties to Russia, and the report notes that his government has been struggling with public anger after the 2024 collapse of a railway station roof that killed 16 people. On Monday, Serbia said it intended to dissolve parliament and move toward a snap election, adding another layer of political calculation to a day already heavy with symbolism.
The images from Belgrade matter because they show how unresolved the legacy of the Balkan wars remains. Mladić was arrested in Serbia in 2011 after 16 years as a fugitive and sentenced to life in prison by a UN tribunal in 2017, but in parts of Serbia he remained a hero rather than a perpetrator. The funeral made that divide visible once again.
For the European Union, the message was simple: a country that wants to join cannot celebrate a man convicted of orchestrating genocide and call that progress.
