Departures of note

Ratko Mladić was a Bosnian Serb military officer who rose through the Yugoslav People's Army to become Chief of Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War of 1992-1995. He commanded the forces responsible for the four-year siege of Sarajevo, the longest siege of a city in modern warfare, and the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed in what international courts recognized as genocide.

Indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1995, Mladić evaded capture for sixteen years, sheltered by Serbian and Bosnian Serb security forces, before his arrest in Serbia in May 2011 and extradition to The Hague. In 2017 he was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence upheld on final appeal in 2021.

Known by the epithet "The Butcher of Bosnia," Mladić was one of the most prominent figures of the Yugoslav Wars, celebrated by Serbian nationalists as a hero and condemned internationally as a war criminal. He died in the UN detention center in The Hague on 27 August 2026 while serving his life sentence.