Bosnian Serb leader Ratko Mladic, known widely as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” died Thursday after a long illness while serving a life sentence on genocide charges in The Hague. He was 84.

Mladic served as the leader of the Army of Republika Srpska, the ethnic Serbian entity that attempted to break away from Bosnia and Herzegovina following its declaration of independence in 1992, and it now serves as an autonomous entity within the country. As commander of the Bosnian Serb forces in the 1992-95 Bosnian Civil War, the deadliest of the wars from the collapse of Yugoslavia, Mladic came to symbolize the worst of the atrocities during the bloodiest conflict Europe had seen between World War II and the Russia–Ukraine War.