BELGRADE — Mirjana Markovic, widow of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic who played a key role in her husband’s policies during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, has died in Russia aged 76, state-run RTS TV reported.

The station, in a report late on Sunday, said she had died in a hospital in Moscow, where she had lived in exile since fleeing Serbia in 2003 to evade prosecution over abuse of office charges.

A family friend, Dragoljub Kocovic, said she had died of complications related to pneumonia. No other details were immediately available.

There was no official reaction from Serbia’s government to the news of her death, but Defense Minister Aleksandar Vulin, a former member of Markovic’s now-defunct Yugoslav Left Party, said he was in mourning “especially because she did not spend her last days in Serbia ... (which) she loved so much”.

“I hope she will find the peace that people took away from her,” state TV quoted Vulin as saying.

Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic, head of the Socialit Party that Milosevic led in the 1990s, also sent condolences to her family and offered the party’s help in organizing Markovic’s funeral, state TV said.

“Maybe we did not always share the same views ... but I respected her as Slobodan Milosevic’s wife and as a scientist,” Dacic said.

Markovic, a former sociology professor at Belgrade University, was a close political confidante of her husband, who swept to power on a wave of Serbia nationalism in 1990.

She stood by him during the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia and NATO’s 1999 aerial bombing campaign that aimed to end Serbian forces’ crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

Milosevic lost power in 2000 in a popular uprising and was extradited to The Hague a year later to face war crimes charges. He was found dead in his cell in The Hague on March 11, 2006.

In her diaries, published in the-then pro-government newspapers in the 1990s, she would often predict Milosevic’s future moves.

Markovic is survived by son Marko and daughter Marija. — Reuters