His victims call him the Butcher of Bosnia. His defenders say he was a nationalist trying to defend his people as Yugoslavia collapsed.

Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb general, was convicted of war crimes on Wednesday over the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s — Europe’s worst massacre since World War II.

His trial, which began in 2012, was the last to be handled by the United Nations war crimes tribunal set up in response to the atrocities.