The body of former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic will be brought to Serbia on September 3, President Aleksandar Vucic said, with authorities expecting tens of thousands of people to attend the funeral of the convicted war criminal.

"The body of Ratko Mladic has been taken over and will arrive in Serbia in the late afternoon," Vucic told reporters during a visit to the northern Serbian town of Coka.

Mladic, who died on August 27 aged 83 while serving a life sentence at a United Nations detention facility in The Hague, was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

He was found guilty of responsibility for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were killed, and for the 43-month siege of Sarajevo, in which about 10,000 people died.

Vucic said several tens of thousands of people could attend the funeral, creating a major security challenge. Mladic's family is expected to announce further details, while Justice Minister Nenad Vujic said last week that Mladic would receive the military and state honours to which he was entitled.

The planned honours have drawn sharp criticism from regional leaders. Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said this week that Serbia would not advance towards European Union membership while its officials honour a convicted war criminal.

The dispute highlights how the wars that accompanied Yugoslavia's collapse continue to shape politics and Serbia's relations with its neighbours.

For the Serbian government, Mladic remains a politically sensitive figure. Although Vucic has sought to position himself as a pro-European moderate internationally, he retains strong support among voters for whom the wars of that decade and Kosovo remain central political issues.

The Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), which Vucic has led for much of the past decade, has pursued a dual political message, presenting European integration and the normalisation of relations with Kosovo to Brussels while allowing a more nationalist narrative to dominate parts of the domestic media environment.

In Serbia, Plenkovic's criticism has been met with accusations of double standards, with commentators pointing to Croatia's own controversial relationship with its wartime past.

Croatia, an EU member since 2013, has faced repeated controversy over symbols associated with the Ustasha, the fascist movement that ruled Croatia during World War Two and persecuted and killed Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascist Croats.

Croatia continues to hold large-scale commemorations of Operation Storm, the 1995 military offensive that ended Croatia's war of secession from Yugoslavia but displaced hundreds of thousands of Croatian Serbs.

The issue was raised again by nationalist singer Marko Perkovic Thompson's record-breaking concert at Zagreb's Hippodrome on July 5, 2025, which drew an estimated 500,000 attendees. Thompson's fans are known for chants including "Kill a Serb". 

Plenkovic's condemnation of Serbia's treatment of Mladic sits uneasily alongside his willingness to defend or minimise nationalist symbols and figures in Croatia, exposing the selective way both countries continue to confront the legacy of the Yugoslav wars.