Russia says UK ‘playing with fire’ amid reports CIA chief has warned Kremlin not to attack Nato
Russia has said it could retaliate against the UK for its support of Kyiv by striking military targets inside and outside Ukraine, amid reports that the director of the CIA warned the Kremlin against attacking Nato during a secretive visit this week. Andy Burnham, Britain’s prime minister, said on Monday the UK would allow Kyiv access to classified technology to start its own production of Storm Shadow long-range cruise missiles. France has also agreed to supply missile technology. Maria Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, said on Thursday Britain and France were “playing with fire”. Responding to the latest Russian threats, a Ministry of Defence official reiterated UK support for Ukraine. “Britain stands shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine and we are committed to providing the equipment Ukraine needs to defend itself against Putin’s illegal invasion. Russia should be in no doubt about the resolve of this government to stand against Russian aggression, in Ukraine and against the UK and our allies,” they said. The Wall Street Journal reported that a visit by John Ratcliffe, the CIA chief, to Moscow on Tuesday had followed a US intelligence assessment that Russia could be planning to test Nato with a limited assault on an allied country. This could range from a cyber-attack to a small-scale incursion, probably in a Baltic nation. Russia has made frequent threats against Ukraine’s western allies during the war, including thinly veiled nuclear threats and others apparently aimed at diplomatic missions in Kyiv. Asked to comment on the reports of Ratcliffe’s visit – and despite Thursday morning’s threat against UK targets – Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said: “A lot of this kind of scare-story material is being published right now. Of course, it has nothing to do with reality and nothing to do with the intentions of the Russian Federation.” The intense scrutiny around the Ratcliffe trip and Russia’s intentions comes amid a new report over shortfalls of missile interceptors available in Europe. A report by the Associated Press says the US military is experiencing a “beyond critical” shortage of advanced missile interceptors in Europe largely driven by Donald Trump’s war with Iran, according to a US defence official in Europe and a Nato official, raising concerns about vulnerabilities in Nato countries to a potential Russian attack. The US defence official said the most concerning shortfall involved Patriot missile interceptors, which can shoot down Russia’s high-speed ballistic missiles. The Nato official confirmed the low inventories of Patriots among American and Nato forces in Europe. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters. Russia is believed to be contemplating a further escalation of its war with Ukraine after months of escalating Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s oil refining infrastructure and other sites, which are imposing an increasing economic toll. The Kremlin has adopted ever more bellicose rhetoric, much of it aimed at a domestic audience, as the war in Ukraine has been brought to its doorstep. In the space of a few days Russia has invoked the threat of its nuclear arsenal against Japan over its territorial claim to the disputed Kuril Islands. It has described relations with the US as a “crisis” and at a historic low point. Ratcliffe’s reported warning mirrored one made by his predecessor, William Burns, in 2021 before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – which Moscow also denied it was contemplating. Concerns over Moscow’s intentions have been increasing amid a rise in incidents of Russian hybrid warfare attributed to Moscow across Europe, from cyber-attacks and drones to arson, at facilities associated with supporting Ukraine’s war efforts. Russia and the US have tried to play down Ratcliffe’s meeting with his Russian counterparts: Trump on Wednesday described the visit as “semi routine”. However, the unusual nature of the encounter has caused intense speculation in the west and Russia. The US president continued to play down the encounter on Thursday, telling Axios that Ratcliffe had arrived in Moscow with “no message” and claiming there was “nothing unusual” about the meeting. Asked later by reporters about reports about the CIA director Ratcliffe had delivered a warning to Russia, Trump replied: “I don’t want to comment on that, but they’re not going to attack.” Nato countries neighbouring Russia have moved quickly to increase their military readiness. Poland this week announced it had taken delivery of its first shipment of South Korean Black Panther main battle tanks, which will be deployed near the border with Russia’s Kaliningrad region. Cezary Tomczyk, Poland’s deputy defence minister, said this month Warsaw was preparing for the possibility of a full-scale conflict. Tomczyk told Super Express media: “We are preparing for war, hoping it never happens.”
Climate crisis could be destabilising mountain areas like Nepal, experts warn
The devastating flash flood that has ripped through the border communities of Nepal and Tibet has heightened fears that the climate crisis is destabilising the geology of mountain and polar regions, threatening millions of people. Satellite imagery suggests a glacier collapse high in the Himalayas was the primary cause of the deadly torrent of mud, water and ice that tore along the Bhotekoshi River on Wednesday. It swept away buildings and roads and left at least 360 dead and 1,400 missing. A magnitude 4.4 earthquake was initially blamed for the collapse. However, it is now thought to have been caused by the huge wall of ice that crashed down on to the north slope of Langtang Lirung, a 7,000-metre (23,000ft) mountain, the impact of which registered a magnitude of 5.2. “Additional analysis of long-period seismic waves indicates that the seismic energy was instead generated by a glacial collapse and debris flow,” the US Geological Survey said. The ice-rock avalanche pushed boulders and other debris into the Lhende Khola River, a tributary of the Bhotekoshi River. Water levels in rivers downstream rose by between 7 and 9 metres within 30 minutes, according to the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, an intergovernmental scientific institution. Scientists are still examining the precise mechanics of the Himalayan disaster, but many observe that glaciers and permafrost around the world are being weakened by global heating, caused by the burning of gas, oil and coal. The detachment of a chunk of the glacier wall came amid unusual heat that was likely to have melted the ice that bound the splintered bedrock together. Two days before the collapse, the ground temperature hit its highest point in the last two years, according to Dr Hamish Pritchard, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey, whose team had sensors 6 miles (10km) away from the site. “These high temperatures would have weakened the snowpack, filled crevasses with water and thawed the bonds between ice and rock that hold these glaciers in place,” he told the Science Media Centre. A series of intense heatwaves has hit the region since early this year and affected countries around the world. Another factor here was the monsoon season, which saturated the soil and swelled rivers. Disasters like this were foretold. In 2023 the UN’s top scientific advisory body warned that previously ice-bound landmasses – from permafrost tundra to mountain glaciers – would become increasingly unstable as temperatures rose. “Every increment of warming will multiply and intensify future hazards from cryosphere regions,” observed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its sixth synthesis report. “Floods, landslides and freshwater shortages from glacier retreat and snow loss pose a serious threat to mountain regions across the world.” Average global temperatures are nudging closer to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. Even faster warming is occurring in alpine and polar regions because the loss of snow and ice is removing the thermal insulation of the land. Dr Richard Waller, a senior lecturer in physical geography at Keele University, said: “The progressive loss of snow and glacier ice results in the surface being less reflective, so it absorbs more solar energy and heats up. In combination with atmospheric warming, this is leading to the melting of mountain permafrost. “Think of the high mountains like this as shattered bedrock glued together by ice-filled joints. As the permafrost and the ice-filled joints melt, then there’s the potential for these types of catastrophic failure.” The thaw is altering the shape, colour and solidity of the landscape, creating or expanding glacial meltwater lakes and, in the long term, threatening the origin of many rivers and the drinking supplies of populations downstream. In many parts of Asia, hundreds of millions of people depend on the rivers such as the Ganges and the Brahmaputra that descend from the glaciers. Scientists have high confidence that glacier retreat is caused by human-driven global heating. This has caused glacier collapses from the Alps to the Andes. In the Langtang catchment area in Nepal, glacier loss rates have increased more than fourfold since 1964, a study has shown. This has contributed to a loss of life on multiple occasions. A smaller flood hit the Bhotekoshi River in July 2025 and in 2015, the Langtang Lirung mountain was hit by an earthquake-induced avalanche that destroyed Langtang village. As emergency services look for bodies and humanitarian relief groups mobilise for survivors, others are asking where next. Waller said any high mountain areas with glaciers and permafrost could be vulnerable, including the European Alps, Caucasus, Himalayas, Andes and beyond. As glacier weakening accelerates, Pritchard called for greater disaster preparedness. “More avalanches and more floods are inevitable, particularly as lakes grow in front of the retreating glaciers,” he said. “Early warning systems are urgently needed to protect the people living in these valleys.”
Race to get aid into Nepal and Tibet amid warnings flood lake could burst
The international community was scrambling to get aid into flood-stricken parts of Nepal and Tibet on Thursday as authorities warned that a lake formed at the site where the deadly torrents occurred was rising and at risk of bursting. The catastrophic flash floods that hit Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday, thundering down valleys and obliterating entire villages, killed at least 389 people and left more than 1,300 missing. Efforts to locate those unaccounted for – including hundreds of tourists from India, the US, Britain, Australia and Canada – have been complicated by the destruction of dozens of bridges and 25 miles (40km) of roads in the mountainous region, which is popular with trekkers and pilgrims. Rescue teams reported finding bodies hundreds of miles downstream from the disaster zone in the Chitwan district of Nepal, near the Tibetan border. Dozens of injured people were transported to Kathmandu for advanced medical care and more than 100 people were rescued by Nepali army personnel in helicopters. Videos from Wednesday’s disaster showed a massive wall of water crashing down on the border as people tried to flee. The power, volume and speed of the floods gave little time for escape. Trucks were overturned and houses, roads and power plants were swept away in Nepal, while officials in Tibet said they feared “major casualties” after a mudslide hit a border crossing. Tom Fletcher, the UN’s humanitarian chief, described the flood as “horrifying”. He said emergency teams had been mobilised and an initial $2m (£1.5m) of disaster funds allocated to cover emergency medical care, shelter and water. Nepal’s disaster authority warned of continuing danger on Thursday, appealing to residents and rescuers to stay away from a swelling lake that had formed at the flood site. Chinese authorities said a barrier lake at the confluence of the Tsogyal and Purupqiangzangbu rivers was overflowing and could burst. Girilal Budhathoki, 36, who lives in the Rasuwa district of Nepal’s Bagmati province, said the flood waters swept away his wife and four children while he was away from the family home. “A huge surge of water came,” he said. “Everything turned completely black, and I couldn’t understand what was happening. Suddenly, something heavy crushed me and I fell down.” Budhathoki realised what had happened only when he returned to the place where his house had stood. “I searched desperately for my wife and children but I couldn’t find them,” he said. “They didn’t make it out. My wife was swept away too. I am all alone now.” Kamal Kharel, who works at a hydropower plant in Chilime, also in Rasuwa district, was in the office when the floods hit. “The whole place shook as if there had been a huge earthquake,” he said. “But when I went outside, I saw everything a storm and raging water.” Kharel and some of his colleagues managed to climb a hill, where they stayed until they were rescued by the army on Thursday morning. He said: “I had never seen waves crashing that high. You only see waves like that in the sea.” People from the hard-hit districts of Nuwakot and Dhading, in Bagmati province, were seen gathering outside an army training centre – the base for helicopter rescue operations – seeking information about missing family members. Police were recording the names of the missing outside the barracks gate. Mobile phone torches were their only source of light as the area remained without electricity because of damaged hydroelectric infrastructure. The village of Soley, in Nuwakot, which had about 25 homes, was almost wiped out, according to Nirajan Paudyal, a Kathmandu-based journalist whose parents and other relatives lived there. Desperate for information, he had travelled to the area on Thursday for news of his family. “There is no update till now,” he said. “I fear there won’t be any update.” More than 500 foreigners were among 826 people missing in Nepal, police and tourism officials said. Among those unaccounted for were 177 from India, 90 from the US, 34 from Australia, 33 from Britain and 25 from Canada. Chinese state media said at least 558 were missing on the Tibet side of the border, of whom at least 260 were foreign nationals. Police in Nepal said 389 bodies had been recovered by Thursday afternoon local time, while Chinese state media reported three dead on the Tibet side of the border. Many of the victims were on a pilgrimage to Kailash Mansarovar, a high-altitude site in Tibet revered by Hindus and Buddhists among others. Early reports from Nepali officials suggested an earthquake could have caused the lower part of a glacier to collapse and trigger the floods. But the US Geological Survey later said what was initially reported as a 4.4-magnitude earthquake was a seismic shock generated by glacial rock and ice collapsing, and the flow of debris. “No earthquake had occurred,” it said. Srijana Gurung, the acting Nepal director for the international NGO Plan International, said communities across the Himalayan country were facing “climate shock after shock” with hardly any time to recover. “Floods and landslides have always happened in Nepal but the climate crisis is making them far more frequent and intense,” she said. “The priority now must be reaching those affected, supporting families searching for loved ones and ensuring vulnerable communities have the assistance they need.” Gurung said children and families who had lost their homes and livelihoods would be in urgent need of medical help, food, shelter and hygiene kits. “There is also a risk of waterborne disease as access to clean water and sanitation is likely to have been damaged,” she said. Scant information has emerged from the Chinese authorities about the scale of the destruction. Tibet is the most tightly controlled part of China even under normal circumstances. Foreign journalists cannot visit the region unless they are part of a government-controlled tour and the authorities have cracked down harshly on calls for greater autonomy from the Tibetan people. Tibetans have almost no contact with the international media because of fears of retribution. Only brief, state-controlled media reports about the floods have been allowed to circulate in China and the authorities have confirmed only three deaths. Chinese reports have focused on rescue efforts. Maya Wang, the deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, wrote on X: “The floods raise questions about whether Chinese authorities could’ve done more to reduce disaster risks, given longstanding concerns from Tibetan diaspora groups & experts about rapid, state-led development in areas where Tibetans have little say.” She called on Beijing to “allow Tibetans access to information and international researchers and journalists unfettered access to the region, and conduct a rigorous investigation into the disaster”.
Search is on for at least 33 Britons missing after flash floods in Nepal and Tibet
Rescue teams in Nepal are searching for at least 33 British nationals who are among those missing after flash floods ravaged its border with Tibet, killing more than 380 people. Nearly 1,400 people are missing, most of them tourists, authorities have said, after a glacier collapse triggered floods that roared down valleys and razed entire villages. Nepal police said 389 bodies had been recovered and the number of injured and rescued people had reached 466. Nepal’s national disaster risk reduction and management authority said the number of out-of-contact foreign nationals had increased to 517. The tour company Kailash Journeys confirmed it had not been able to account for seven UK nationals – five women and two men aged between 18 and 55 – travelling with the operator. Another tour company, the Trekkers’ Society, said among the British citizens who had been completing one of its tours to the sacred Hindu site of Mount Kailash were four males aged 14, 50, 50 and 54, and five women aged 40, 46, 50, 50 and 53. The tour operator Alpine Eco Trek said a 13-year-old girl was among the missing British nationals and two Irish citizens were also missing. They were on a nine-day tour to Mount Kailash and crossing into Tibet from Nepal when they became trapped at the border as the flash floods struck. Other missing British nationals with Alpine Eco Trek are three men aged 65, 64 and 52, and seven women aged 44, 47, 51, 60, 63, 63 and 65, according to travel logs. The tour company Himalayan Glacier US told the BBC it had lost contact with a group of 47 guests, including two British citizens, who were en route to Mount Kailash. Fishtail Tours, a Nepali travel agency, said one British person was missing. Andy Burnham has pledged an initial £5m in UK government support and offered to send emergency responders and rescue support to assist Nepal’s disaster response efforts. Speaking to journalists during a visit to south Wales, he said: “It’s a devastating picture that is emerging from what has happened in Nepal. Scenes that we’ve never seen the like before, I don’t think, certainly the scale of the devastation. “So there is immediate action being taken. We are deploying consular support staff to the region so that British nationals will be able to access support 24/7. Obviously there are a number of British nationals who currently are thought to be missing and we’ll be providing all the support we can to their families in what is a very distressing and devastating situation.” He added in a statement: “In the past, Nepal has been there for Britain in our hour of need, and we will be there for Nepal in its hour of need right now.” King Charles said he and Queen Camilla were heartbroken and sent their “most profound sympathy” to those affected. “Many in the United Kingdom have strong, deep and personal ties to this part of the world,” he said. The Prince and Princess of Wales also expressed their shock. “We are thinking of everyone caught up in this terrible disaster,” they said. The president of the Nepal Centre for Disaster Management, Bishal Nath Upreti, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the flash floods were like a “tsunami from the sky”. He said: “It’s a huge debris, and in fact, after the 2015 earthquake, this is one of the largest disasters that we have [had] in Nepal.” He added: “It was such a huge amount of water. You can imagine it is 20m cubic metres excess water on the river … Villages and villages along the almost 40 to 50 kilometres were completely wiped out.” The Nepal tourism board said on Wednesday that 33 UK citizens were among the foreign nationals unaccounted for. At least three people had died in Tibet, according to China’s state broadcaster CCTV, while the Xinhua news agency said 558 people were unaccounted for in the region. Rescuers are racing to locate people missing in the mountainous Rasuwa region, which borders China’s autonomous region of Tibet and is popular with trekkers and pilgrims. Pramod Poudel, from Uckfield, East Sussex, told the BBC that his wife, parents, brother and uncle had been caught in flash flooding. He said he would fly to Nepal on Thursday night to try to make contact with them. Poudel said: “I guess there is no power so they can’t charge their phones – to be honest, it’s a very hard and difficult time at the moment.” In an emotional interview, he said: “I have seen pictures of where my home town used to be … and there is nothing there now.” The UK minister Pat McFadden told Times Radio the picture was “not completely clear yet”, with “many, many more” people understood to be missing than those reported by the Nepalese authorities, and no clear figures from China yet. He said: “In terms of missing Britons, my colleague the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, has posted on social media phone numbers that people can call for further information. “But it’s a fast-moving picture. We don’t have a full picture yet of the numbers missing.” The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it was “deeply saddened by the loss of life and devastation caused by the floods in Nepal”. It added: “British nationals in Nepal should follow local authority advice and exercise caution while travelling. For consular assistance call (+44) (0)207 008 5000 or (+977) (0)14237100.”
Ratko Mladić obituary
After the Bosnian mountain town of Srebrenica fell to Serb troops in July 1995, its terrified Muslim residents were given assurances by the Serb commander of the conquering army, General Ratko Mladić, who has died aged 83. He told them: “Anyone who wants to leave will be transported, be they old or young. Don’t be afraid and don’t rush. Let the women and children go first.” In video footage of that day, the general can be seen patting the cheek of an eight-year-old Muslim boy and offering him chocolate. “Please don’t panic. Be careful not to lose any children. Don’t be afraid. Nobody will harm you.” By then, the Hague war crimes tribunal would later determine, Mladić had ordered the executions of all males of army age or deemed old enough to bear arms. More than 8,000 men and teenage boys were mown down in what would be the worst massacre Europe had witnessed for half a century. After many years on the run, in 2017 Mladić was convicted of genocide for the slaughter at Srebrenica, alongside convictions for war crimes and crimes against humanity for the many massacres over the preceding three years, as Mladić, his fellow generals, and the Bosnian Serb leadership sought to ethnically cleanse Bosnia of Muslims and Croats. At the time of his death, in a UN prison hospital in The Hague, Mladić, one of the most reviled mass killers in modern European history, was serving a life sentence. However, among nationalists in Serbia and the Serb half of Bosnia, the Republika Srpska, he is still portrayed as a hero – powerful evidence that the murderous ideology he embodied is still very much alive. Born in Božanovići, a village in the mountains of the southern Herzegovina region, Ratko was the son of Stana (nee Lalović) and Nedja Mladić. His parents were hiding out with a band of partisans fighting the Nazis and their local allies, the Croatian Ustaše. His given name means “warlike”, and his father was killed in battle before he was two years old. In socialist postwar Yugoslavia, ruled by the partisan leader Josip Broz Tito, the teenage Mladić served a short apprenticeship as a tinsmith, before finding his true calling in the Yugoslav National Army (JNA). He excelled at the military academy, graduated in 1965 and joined Tito’s communist party like any ambitious officer. In 1966 he married Bosiljka Jedić, had two children, Darko and Ana, and steadily rose through the JNA ranks to the level of brigade commander by the time federal Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991-92. The stocky, ruddy-faced soldier embodied all the contradictions of Yugoslavia. He mouthed the party’s mantra of “brotherhood and unity” among the country’s ethnicities, but remained a Serb chauvinist in his bones, with the desire for revenge, not just for the second world war, but for the Ottoman conquest more than five centuries earlier. After Tito’s death, the old socialist bromides began to lose their power. Slobodan Milošević, a wily smooth-talking ex-banker, took the helm in 1989 and soon realised that communism had run its course as the ideological rationale for the concentration of power. Serb nationalism on the other hand was resurgent, and Milošević deftly switched horses. Serb officers were put in charge of JNA outposts across Yugoslavia, and Mladić was dispatched to Kosovo with the task of suppressing majority ethnic Albanians, and then to Croatia in the summer of 1991, to fight against secessionist forces in that country’s war of independence. By then he was a colonel, with a growing reputation for ruthlessness in the field and the devastating use of artillery on enemy soldiers and civilians alike. So when Serb separatist leaders such as Radovan Karadzić in Bosnia were looking for a military commander to help them subjugate the republic and wrest control of Sarajevo, they called Mladić. The Republika Srpska army that he led was equipped and sponsored from Belgrade by Milošević, whose ultimate aim was to create a Greater Serbia in the wreckage of Yugoslavia. But how Mladić went about that was left up to him, and his ethnic bigotry and sadism was allowed to run rampant. In 1992, his forces took control of a horseshoe of territory in western and eastern Bosnia, slaughtering Muslims and Croats and setting up concentration camps. Of the estimated 100,000 dead from the Bosnian war, about 38,000 were civilians, and more than 80% of the civilian deaths were Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim), a statistic that owes a lot to the single-mindedness with which Mladić went about his task. Though ruthlessly effective in liquidating civilian populations, Mladić failed to overcome the improvised resistance put up by defenders of Sarajevo. Instead he oversaw a 47-month siege of the city (the longest siege of a capital in modern warfare), deploying mortars in the surrounding mountains and snipers in high-rise blocks in the suburbs, to pick off its citizens. “Pound them senseless!” he was heard to urge his men in one intercepted communication. Mladić’s true vision of Serb dominance relied on the destruction and uprooting of competing ethnicities. Unlike the foppish Karadzić, who relished the attention of US and European statesmen seeking to broker a peace deal, the general had no time for foreigners. An American official once asked him if he had ever been abroad. “I went to Geneva once. I didn’t like the beer,” the general replied. Almost single-handedly, Mladić killed off an effort to end the war in 1993 led by the US envoy Cyrus Vance and the former UK foreign secretary David Owen. Defying Karadzić, he convinced the Republika Srpska assembly to reject the Vance-Owen plan with a 45-minute display of nationalist bombast. He relished his brutal reputation, but it helped destroy his family. He had sought to ensure their safety by keeping them in Belgrade, but there Ana fell in love with a Serbian doctor, a human rights activist who was appalled at what was happening in Bosnia. He told her he would marry her only if she renounced her father. Trapped between romantic love and family loyalty, she took her father’s pistol from its display case one night in February 1994 and shot herself. Mladić refused to acknowledge any responsibility, preferring conspiracy theories and sinking into an ever darker view of the world and his place in it, as a Serb avenger for centuries-old Ottoman tyranny. When he led his troops into Srebrenica, a UN safe haven, he proclaimed the conquest was “a gift to the Serb people”. “Finally, the time has come to take revenge on the Turks in this region,” Mladić declared to a camera held by one of his aides. He had convinced himself that he belonged among the pantheon of greats of military history, a student of Hannibal, Alexander the Great and Carl von Clausewitz, but his army crumpled rapidly when in 1995 western forces finally intervened on the side of Croatian and Bosnian forces in the wake of the Srebrenica genocide. Mladić escaped justice for more than 16 years. He was sheltered across the border in Serbia, where a special army unit was created to ensure he lived in comfort and secrecy at a succession of military bases. After the fall of Milošević in 2000, when Serbia embarked on what turned out to be a brief flirtation with liberalism and pro-western governments, Mladić’s protection fell away, forcing him to trust a constantly shrinking circle of loyalists, as he moved from one hideout to another, each more squalid than the one beforer. He was finally found in May 2011 by Serbian police in an outbuilding of a farm belonging to one of his cousins in the village of Lazarevo, near the border with Romania. The muttering old man they stumbled across was scarcely recognisable, but he told them: “You have found who you’re looking for.” Transported to The Hague, he spat defiance at his trial before the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and his disruptive antics meant he was excluded from the court when the verdict was delivered in November 2017: guilty of one count of genocide, five counts of crimes against humanity, and four of violations of the laws or customs of war. In prison in the Netherlands, many convicted Serb, Croat and Bosniak war criminals forged a strange jailhouse camaraderie. Mladić remained a stubborn exception, keeping to himself. As his health declined, his legal team sought to win his release on humanitarian grounds, but the court in The Hague ruled in July 2025 that he was receiving adequate care in the Dutch prison. His incarceration was scant recompense for his victims, and the judges were reluctant to cut it short. Mladić is survived by his wife and son. • Ratko Mladić, military commander, born 12 March 1943; died 27 August 2026
Ratko Mladić, the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, dies in The Hague
Ratko Mladić, the infamous Serbian general who was serving a life sentence for genocide committed during the Bosnian war, has died in prison in The Hague. Mladić had been one of the main architects of the policy of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war. He was convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 killing of at least 8,000 Muslims in the UN-designated “safe area” Srebrenica, the worst massacre in Europe since the second world war. Mladić, who was nicknamed the “Butcher of Bosnia”, had been in ill health after having a series of strokes. A UN international tribunal confirmed Mladić’s death, saying he had died in hospital in The Hague earlier in the day. “Mladić passed away today while hospitalised in The Hague,” the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals said in a statement, adding that judge Graciela Gatti Santana had ordered “a full inquiry into the circumstances” of his death. Described by the former UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein as “the epitome of evil” after his conviction, Mladić was one of the most notorious figures of the war that killed more than 100,000 people and left more than 1 million homeless. He commanded his troops to “scorch the brains” of Bosnian Muslim people and had boasted of being a “Serbian god”. The news of Mladić’s death was first broken on Serbian state television after his son, Darko, had spoken earlier about his father’s declining health. Mladić was sentenced by a UN tribunal to life imprisonment in 2017 over genocide and war crimes committed during Bosnia’s 1990s war. He was arrested in Serbia in 2011 after 16 years on the run. The slaughter in Srebrenica was the culmination of a brutal war that had lasted more than three years, during which Mladić oversaw the siege of Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, which was pounded daily by artillery, tank and sniper fire, killing 10,000 people. The goal of the Serbian leadership, which Mladić was tasked with implementing – as determined by the UN’s international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) – was the forcible expulsion of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian land for the creation of a greater Serbia. The tribunal found that Mladić, together with the late Serbian president Slobodan Milošević and the Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić, were part of a criminal conspiracy to implement the plan. “I do not recognise this court,” Mladić said at an ICTY hearing on his case in 2014. When he was sentenced, he shouted: “This is all lies, you are all liars!” The Serbian campaign culminated in the horror of Srebrenica when, after the withdrawal of Dutch UN peacekeeping forces, thousands of Bosnian men and boys were rounded up, killed and their bodies bulldozed into mass graves. Mladić had the siege filmed to show him praising his “lads” and haranguing the UN peacekeepers who misguidedly accepted his solemn word that the inhabitants would be safe in his hands. “We give this town to the Serb people as a gift,” Mladić said to the camera, claiming the victory as revenge against Muslim Turks, who had once held the area as part of the Ottoman empire. The next day, Mladić’s forces were filmed handing out sweets to children, promising their safe passage. Meanwhile, thousands of men and boys were being readied for slaughter. When Nato tried in 1995 to rein in his forces with the threat of limited airstrikes, his troops seized UN peacekeepers as human shields, chaining them to likely targets. The son of a second world war partisan fighter killed in 1945, Mladić was, according to his family, born in March 1943 in the tiny Bosnian village of Bozinovici, putting his age at death at 83 (though official documents recorded his date of birth a year earlier, in 1942). Mladić was an officer in the communist Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) when Yugoslavia’s disintegration began in 1991. When Bosnian Serbs rose in 1992 against Bosnia’s Muslim-led secession, Mladić was chosen to command the new Bosnian Serb army that swiftly overran 70% of the country. Dozens of towns were besieged with heavy weapons that once belonged to the JNA and villages were burned down, as 22,000 troops with the UN Protection Force stood by, more or less helplessly, under orders not to take sides. A combination of western pressure, Nato strikes and covert US arms and training for Croats and Muslims gradually turned the tide against Mladić’s army. After the war, Mladić went into hiding, with the reformists ruling post-conflict Serbia not daring to move against a man who was a hero to a core of nationalist Serbs. Mladić continued to insist he was “a simple man” chosen to protect his people. When he was finally arrested in 2011, he put up no resistance. He had a heart attack in 2013 and seemed older than his years. By his own account, he felt like a frail old man. This month, a UN doctor said Mladić’s death “may occur at any time”, possibly within weeks, but his application for release was again rejected. Munira Subašić, from the Mothers of Srebrenica group, said she deplored that Mladić’s crimes were still being denied by many Bosnian Serbs. “Today, a major war criminal died, the criminal of the Balkans,” Subašić said. But while 31 years later mothers of victims were “still carrying the pain in our souls … we are still listening to denials, we are still listening to how Ratko Mladić was a hero for the Serbs”. Elizabeth Evenson, the international justice director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The death of Ratko Mladić, the former Bosnian Serb army commander found guilty of genocide, including the massacre of up to 8,000 Bosnian men and boys after the fall of Srebrenica, Bosnia, in July 1995, is a reminder of the ongoing need for justice, truth, and reparations in the western Balkans. “Full accountability for such terrible crimes, in Bosnia and elsewhere, demands commitment by governments to justice, even decades after the events themselves.”