In the final days of the battle, the evacuation of the Vukovar hospital was negotiated between Croatian authorities, the JNA and the European Community Monitor Mission in cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The ICTY convicted two JNA officers in connection with the massacre, and also tried former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević for a number of war crimes, including those committed at Vukovar.

In February 2015, the International Court of Justice ruled that the siege, massacre and simultaneous atrocities committed elsewhere in Croatia did not constitute genocide.

The site of the mass grave is marked by a monument and the storage building used at Ovčara farm to hold the prisoners in captivity before their execution was rebuilt as a memorial centre in 2006.

In 1990, ethnic tensions between Serbs and Croats worsened after the electoral defeat of the government of the Socialist Republic of Croatia by the Croatian Democratic Union (Serbo-Croatian: Hrvatska demokratska zajednica – HDZ).

[2] The rebellion was centred on the predominantly Serb-populated areas of the Dalmatian hinterland around Knin, approximately 60 kilometres (37 miles) north-east of Split,[3] as well as parts of Lika, Kordun, Banovina and eastern Slavonia.

Under the control of the Croatian Ministry of Defence and commanded by retired JNA General Martin Špegelj, the four guards brigades comprised approximately 8,000 troops.

The fighting in and around Vukovar lasted months and eventually drew in the JNA's main armoured force, which had previously been slated to advance west towards Serb-held areas in western Slavonia.

In addition to relieving its Vukovar garrison, the JNA wished to dissipate the Croatian forces in the city so that they would not pose any threat to its rear in the event that the campaign progressed west of Vinkovci.

[16] The JNA was reinforced by local Serb-manned TO units and Serbian paramilitary volunteers who were meant to replace those reservists that had failed to respond to their call-up.

[26] On the morning of 19 November, the ECMM became aware that organised resistance had ceased in Vukovar, but it did not receive any information on the fate of the hospital patients.

[27] The hospital was also toured by French reporter Agnès Vahramian that day,[28] and there she recorded an interview with Jean-Michel Nicolier, a wounded Frenchman who fought alongside Croatian forces in Vukovar.

An armoured vehicle blocked access to the bridge leading to the hospital,[30] and a JNA officer at the scene, Major Veselin Šljivančanin, refused to let the ICRC pass.

"[32] The ECMM personnel that had arrived at the Zidine junction to meet the returning convoy were informed by the JNA that the evacuees would instead be turned over to them in Bosanski Šamac, in northern Bosnia, on 22 November.

Once they reached Ovčara, ten kilometres (six miles) away from Vukovar,[41] the captives were ordered from the buses one-by-one and forced to run the gauntlet past dozens of JNA troops and Serb paramilitaries towards a farm storage building.

[36] Over the course of the day, the JNA military police failed to prevent soldiers of the Croatian Serb TO and Serbian paramilitaries from beating the prisoners in the storage building.

[46] Leva Supoderica was a volunteer unit set up by the Serbian Radical Party (Serbo-Croatian: Srpska radikalna stranka; SRS) in Šid, Serbia,[46] and subordinated to the JNA's 1st Guards Mechanised Brigade.

Three days later, Snow went to Vukovar and drove to Ovčara accompanied by Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Larry Moore who was deployed to the region with the UNPROFOR.

They examined the site still under guard by the Russian troops, excavated the skull spotted by Moore and the rest of the body, as well as another set of partially covered remains.

[60] After the Croatian Serb authorities blocked several attempts to further investigate the mass grave at Ovčara, still under constant guard by the Russian peacekeepers, the site was visited by then-U.S.

[65] In the four years preceding the exhumation, Croatian authorities collected ante-mortem information on presumed victims, built a modern morgue at the School of Medicine and trained geneticists in DNA analysis to allow for the identification of those who could not be identified by ICTY investigators using traditional methods.

According to her, they were exhumed by Croatian Serb authorities and moved to a secondary location in early 1992 because the grave was so shallow that body parts protruded through the ground surface.

[29] In November 1995, the ICTY indicted Mrkšić, Šljivančanin and JNA captain Miroslav Radić for war crimes related to the Ovčara massacre.

The arrests were made shortly before the expiration of a deadline set by the U.S. Congress linking financial assistance to Serbia to its cooperation with the ICTY.

Milošević's trial ended without any verdict upon his death in March 2006, while the Vukovar-related charges against Stanišić and Simatović were dropped from their indictments even before the pair were acquitted on all counts in 2013.

[75] In 2018, he was convicted of hate speech for inciting the deportation of Croats from Hrtkovci in 1992, and sentenced to ten years imprisonment, but acquitted on all other counts, including those pertaining to Vukovar.

[78] In a separate trial completed in 2014, Serbian authorities convicted and sentenced Petar Ćirić to 15 years in prison for participating in the massacre as a member of Leva Supoderica.

[80] In February 2015, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the siege and ensuing massacre did not constitute genocide, though it confirmed that serious crimes had taken place.

The dim interior of the building, accessed through a glass-encased foyer, features illuminated photographs of 200 victims exhumed from the mass grave and the 61 missing who were executed at Ovčara.

The concrete floor contains encased spent cartridges and the Spiral of Evil (Serbo-Croatian: Spirala zla) sculpture displaying the names of 261 victims.