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A deceitful tactic in modern conflicts – a government’s secret use of Rambo-style proxy militias to harm civilians and thus avoid accountability – just received a major setback. A United Nations court in The Hague issued a final verdict last week confirming that two former security officials in Serbia helped set up “special” combat teams in the 1990s that killed thousands of non-Serbs during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia.

The verdict – which took 20 years of legal proceedings – “leaves no doubt about the involvement of Serbia’s police and security services in the wartime atrocities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is something that Serbia’s authorities continue to deny to this day,” concluded Amnesty International. The two former officials, Jovica Stanišić and Franko Simatović, were given sentences of 15 years by the court, known as the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals.

The verdict creates a welcome precedent for finding the truth about atrocities committed by other so-called paramilitary groups in conflicts from Ukraine to Sudan to Syria. It might also help end the denial among many Serbs about the war crimes committed by government-backed groups like Arkan’s Tigers and the Scorpions during the Balkan wars.

“Without the truth there’s nothing and each lie provokes another lie,” Goran Zadro, a Croat who survived an attack in 1993 by Serb forces, told Balkan Insight. “Here, each community has its own truth.”

Even though the verdict was a long time coming, the international prosecution of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia has provided a lesson for Ukraine. Soon after the Russian invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian officials began to probe the killing of civilians by both Russian military and the mercenary force known as the Wagner Group. The evidence collected so far – even as the war rages on – could be useful later in linking Kremlin officials to alleged backing of militias that commit war crimes.

The May 31 verdict at the court in The Hague was a major step to establishing the truth and addressing impunity, said Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights. It exposed the tactic of a government supporting an armed group to do the “dirty work” of killing innocent civilians and violating international norms of conduct in war. It also set a primary example, writes journalist Marija Ristic in Balkan Insight, “of how justice for the crimes of state-sponsored paramilitary groups is an achievable goal.”