BELGRADE — Serbia’s hopes of joining the EU were further threatened Monday by the funeral of a notorious army commander convicted of war crimes and the Srebrenica genocide.

Ratko Mladić’s send-off — attended by thousands of people in Belgrade on a balmy September afternoon — drew condemnation from Brussels, which is already at odds with Serbia over its democratic decline, its crackdown on press and judicial freedoms and failure to sanction Russia for the war against Ukraine.

“Any glorification of war criminals, genocide denial and revisionism contradict the most fundamental European values and have no place in the EU or in EU candidate countries,” Christian Wigand, a spokesperson for the European External Action Service, said in a statement Monday, while European Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos canceled a planned visit to Belgrade this week over what she called the “glorification” of Mladić.

The Serbian government officially said that it had no hand in organizing the funeral, yet Mladić’s body was flown on a government plane and members of the Serbian Armed Forces escorted the coffin to its final resting place while the military band played a funeral march. The patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Porfirije — a close ally of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić — led the funeral mass, where Mladić’s coffin was draped in the Serbian flag.  

Mladić, a general who spearheaded military campaigns across Bosnia and Croatia and was convicted of genocide for the killing of more than 8,000 people in early July 1995 in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, died in late August aged 84 while serving a life sentence at Scheveningen prison in the Netherlands.

Senior Serbian officials turned out for the service at the Church of Saint Luke on Monday, including Defense Minister Bratislav Gašić and Justice Minister Nenad Vujić. Danilo Vučić, the president’s son, was also in attendance, as was Russian Ambassador Aleksandr Botsan-Kharchenko.

Vučić, a populist nationalist who has been president of Serbia since 2017, himself skipped the funeral to meet with Shavkat Mirziyoyev, president of Uzbekistan, and made no reference to Mladić or the funeral in his public statements.

The president has often positioned himself as a pragmatic technocrat in Brussels, while Serbia continues an EU accession bid that started in 2014. But critics and human rights organizations have accused him of allowing — sometimes encouraging — nationalism to foment domestically.

Vujić, the justice minister, defended the right of Serbian citizens to pay their respects to Mladić on Friday, stressing that “the punishment ends with death.”

Mladić holds a particular cachet among nationalists who believe Serbs are entitled to more land and power in the Balkans, and not only those aligned with the ruling party. The young men in the funeral procession wore black T-shirts with Mladić’s face across the front, or flags printed with his smiling portrait tied around their shoulders. Others held signs reading “You did not die, General, you live in our hearts.”

Miloš Jovanović, leader of the New Democratic Party of Serbia, an opposition figure who often attacks Vučić from the right, also attended the funeral mass and said that Serbian citizens regard Mladić as “a symbol of freedom [for] Serb people.”

Since Mladić’s death, murals dedicated to him have appeared across Belgrade, while a public wake was organized on Saturday. The football clash Sunday between Serbia’s two largest clubs, Partizan and Crvena Zvezda, opened with a banner bearing his face and the message “Direction Potočari!” — a grim nod to Mladić’s seizure of the eastern Bosnian village where thousands of Bosniaks were summarily executed.

People gather for Mladić’s funeral procession in Belgrade on Sept. 7, 2026. | Oliver Bunic/AFP via Getty Images

Neighboring Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo have condemned the events. Bosnia — the country most affected by his ethnic cleansing campaigns — filed criminal complaints against figures who have promoted Mladić’s image since his death, an act punishable by law in the country.

For Serbians who have spent years watching Mladić rehabilitated by successive governments into a defender of the Serb people — his crimes watered down or denied in official retellings — the outrage from the EU has arrived far too late.

“It is rather irritating to read statements from foreign actors professing shock that an authoritarian, nationalist regime would instrumentalize the funeral of a convicted war criminal,” said Srdjan Majstorović, chairman of the board of the European Policy Center in Belgrade.

“All of this happened on their watch, so there is no room for surprise,” he continued, highlighting that Brussels has presented Vučić as “essential to the country’s progress.”

Days before the funeral, 29 EU lawmakers from five political groups penned a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and to Kos demanding that Brussels freeze all pre-accession payments to Serbia, citing reports that the country had deployed spyware against student leaders, activists and opposition politicians.

The spyware allegations land after nearly two years of student-led protests against Vučić’s government, which began after the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad in November 2024 killed 16 people and became the largest sustained challenge to his rule.

Serbia has not opened a new negotiating chapter with the EU since December 2021, blocked by eight member countries over its rule-of-law record and its refusal to sanction Russia for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

Despite launching their bids much later, Ukraine and Moldova rank ahead of Serbia in their progress, and neighboring Montenegro is widely deemed a front-runner to join the bloc.