“I was fortunate enough to work with many leaders who ended up at the Hague Tribunal.”

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said he was “lucky” to work alongside former leaders of Yugoslavia who were accused of war crimes. About this he told at the forum “Territory of Senses”.

Shoigu noted this, speaking of internal threats, which, in his opinion, have recently led to decay in society. “And this decomposition seems to be going on unnoticed. Unfortunately, I have witnessed many such things, starting from the same Serbia, or the former Yugoslavia. With many leaders who later ended up in the Hague Tribunal, I will not hide that I was lucky and fortunate to work together, to interact. This is Milosevic, Karadzic, General Mladic. And someone is no longer there, but then at the last moment they realized that the country was decaying from within, ”the minister said.

The Hague Tribunal for Yugoslavia became the first international body after the Nuremberg Tribunal and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East to consider cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. He is often criticized by the Serbian and Russian authorities.

In June of this year, a court in The Hague announced the final decision on the appeal of the former general of the Bosnian Serb army Ratko Mladic, who was sentenced in 2017 to life in prison for massacres of civilians and other war crimes. Mladic’s appeal was dismissed. In total, there were 10 points in the charge. Chief among these were the four-year siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, with thousands killed by shelling, and the July 1995 massacre of Srebrenica, where Radic’s soldiers killed more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. Mladic, according to the prosecution and the court, personally oversaw the massacres of thousands of Bosnian Muslims.

In May 1999, the Hague Tribunal brought charges against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic of 1999 war crimes in Kosovo. Milosevic and four top Yugoslav leaders were charged on five counts qualified as crimes against humanity – murder, political, racial and religious persecution, deportation – and one count as a violation of the laws and customs of war. On April 1, 2001, Milosevic was arrested. On June 28, 2001, he was transferred to the UN prison in The Hague. On March 11, 2006, he died of a heart attack in the prison of the Hague Tribunal.

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was sentenced to life in prison by the international tribunal in The Hague for genocide during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. He was found guilty of genocide due to his involvement in the murder of over 7,000 Muslim men and teenagers in Srebrenica in 1995. This massacre has been called the most heinous in Europe since World War II. The judges also held Karadzic responsible for the siege of Sarajevo, which lasted more than three years, during which about 10,000 civilians were killed by artillery shelling and sniper fire.