Serbia in the Yugoslav Wars from the FRY, as the Bosnian Serb faction alone could not pay for the costs. The Bosnian Serb Army was led by Ratko Mladić, an extremely controversial figure, who served the Yugoslav Army during the Croatian War of Independence 1991-1992, and has been accused of committing war crimes in Bosnia. Serbian Radical Party founder and paramilitary Vojislav Seselj publicly claimed Milošević personally asked him to send paramilitaries from Serbia into Bosnia and Herzegovina. After 1993, media reports of large-scale atrocities by the Bosnian Serb armed forces, such as the long siege of Sarajevo, resulted in increased pressure and sanctions by
Kenan Hajdarević (politician) 2012, Serbian president Boris Tadić attended a ceremony marking the twentieth anniversary of the Republika Srpska and received a medal and ribbon from Republika Srpska president Milorad Dodik. This meeting was very controversial; the Republika Srpska was given legal recognition as part of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the 1995 Dayton Agreement, but it had a prior history as a breakaway Bosnian Serb entity in the 1992–95 Bosnian War, and many of its wartime leaders were later convicted of serious war crimes directed primarily against the Bosniak population. The commemoration of the entity's "de facto" establishment in January 1992 was widely