EU Condemns Military Honours at Ratko Mladić Funeral as Serbia Accession Talks Stall

Mladić died in late August at 84 inside a United Nations medical unit in The Hague. He was serving a life sentence passed down in 2017 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the formThe European Union froze all high-level accession negotiations with Serbia on Tuesday morning.er Yugoslavia (ICTY) for genocide, including the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, and the 1,460-day siege of Sarajevo. Once his body cleared Dutch customs and arrived at Surčin airport, the government turned what could have been a private family affair at the Church of St Luke into an official military event.

Active-duty soldiers from the Guard Brigade carried the coffin.

## Defence Ministry Order 412 and the legal loophole

The military presence was not an oversight. It rested on a specific administrative loophole inside Serbian defence regulations that successive governments in Belgrade refused to close.

Under Serbian military law, retired flag officers keep their ranks and their rights to state-funded military funerals until those ranks are stripped. Stripping a general of his commission requires one of two things: a final conviction from a domestic Serbian military court-martial, or a direct decree signed by the President of the Republic. Belgrade never ran a domestic court-martial against Mladić after his 2011 arrest in Lazarevo, nor did it issue a presidential decree revoking his commission.

On paper, the convicted war criminal remained a retired Colonel General in good standing on the personnel ledgers in Kneza Miloša street.

"State services simply applied standard administrative procedure for deceased flag officers," Serbian Justice Minister Nenad Vujić told reporters outside the courthouse in Belgrade. He added that the Defence Ministry acted strictly under statutory service regulations following a formal request from the Mladić family, and that the Cabinet issued no executive order designating the ceremony an official state funeral.

The roster of attendees proved otherwise. Defence Minister Bratislav Gašić, Social Affairs Minister Milica Đurđević Stamenkovski, and Minister without Portfolio Nenad Popović stood in the front row. Milorad Dodik, President of Republika Srpska, travelled from Banja Luka alongside Željka Cvijanović, the Serb member of the Bosnian presidency. Russian Ambassador Aleksandr Bocan-Kharchenko walked past cameras to deliver a written message of condolence directly to Mladić's widow, Bosiljka.

November municipal elections and local arithmetic

President Aleksandar Vučić stayed away from the churchyard. His office set up a televised meeting at the Palace of Serbia with visiting Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev at the exact hour soldiers loaded the casket onto the gun carriage.

The absence was deliberate. Vučić faces municipal elections across Serbia on 17 November, with his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) under pressure in industrial strongholds like Niš and Kragujevac. Sending his defence minister to the church satisfied hardline nationalist voters who still treat Mladić as a hero, while keeping the president’s own hands off the casket maintained a layer of plausible deniability for Western embassies.

The tactic failed to stop domestic criticism.

"Active-duty troops of this republic carried the coffin of a man convicted of genocide," Radomir Lazović, co-leader of the Green-Left Front, said on the steps of the National Assembly. "This was not a legal obligation. It was a deliberate political decision that locks Serbia out of European market frameworks."

Local civil rights groups, including the Humanitarian Law Centre in Belgrade, pointed out that the government used soldiers from the 250th Missile Brigade—the same unit stationed near the capital—to execute the three-volley volley salute at 12:30 PM.

Chapter 22 and the frozen 35

European diplomats reacted without the usual delays. Brussels made ICTY cooperation a mandatory requirement when Serbia applied for candidate status in 2009 and opened formal entry talks in 2014. Mladić's arrest in 2011 after 16 years on the run was treated at the time as the key condition for opening Chapter 23 on judiciary and fundamental rights.

Commissioner Marta Kos cancelled her 14:00 briefing in Belgrade via a short post on X, stating that public military honours for a convicted genocidaire violate every entry criterion of the Union. The European External Action Service followed up by cancelling all working group sessions scheduled for the rest of the week.

The freeze hits an accession process that was already stalled. Serbia has opened 22 out of 35 negotiation chapters since entry talks began, but it has failed to close a single chapter since 14 December 2021.

Key member states are now pushing to formalise the stop. Foreign ministers from Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark have requested a dedicated agenda item to review Serbia's candidate status when the Foreign Affairs Council meets in Luxembourg on 19 October.

Protests in Sarajevo and the Dayton fallout

In Sarajevo, the reaction was immediate. Associations representing survivors of the 1995 massacre filed a formal complaint with the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Christian Schmidt, requesting a review of whether Serbian military participation breached the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement.

Denis Bećirović, the Bosniak member of the tripartite presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, called an emergency press conference at 15:00 in Sarajevo. He stated that deploying active Serbian troops to honour the commander responsible for the shellings of Sarajevo and Srebrenica represents an act of political intimidation against returned refugees in the Podrinje region.

In Banja Luka, political leaders took the opposite view. The National Assembly of Republika Srpska held a minute of silence during its afternoon session, with Speaker Nenad Stevandić declaring Mladić’s wartime commands central to the creation of the Serb entity under the 1995 constitution.

The funeral also highlighted Belgrade's continued divergence from EU foreign policy. Serbia remains the only candidate country in Europe that has refused to adopt EU sanction packages against Moscow following the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Russian state television broadcast the funeral live, highlighting Ambassador Bocan-Kharchenko's presence beside the Serbian Defence Minister.