Behind an unmarked white door on a graffiti-lined backstreet in Sarajevo, a company called AAFS Infrastructure and Energy is believed to be on the verge of securing concession agreements that would allow it to build and operate a gas pipeline across the Balkans — a project that would replace Russian fossil fuel supplies with American liquefied natural gas. Senior Bosnian officials, who have declined to be identified given the sensitivity of the negotiations, have described it as potentially the most consequential infrastructure undertaking in the country's modern history. What has drawn particular scrutiny, however, is not the scale of the contracts but the nature of the company itself, which has no documented record of attempting anything approaching this level of complexity.

AAFS is represented by two figures whose connections to Donald Trump have been widely noted. One is a Washington-based attorney who is understood to have acted for the Trump family in politically significant legal proceedings. The other is the brother of Trump's former national security adviser. Both men are reported to have been involved in efforts to challenge the outcome of the 2020 presidential election — a cause that remains close to Trump personally. A Guardian investigation, drawing on leaked documents, corporate filings, and interviews with current and former officials on both sides of the Atlantic, has sought to examine how the company came to occupy such a prominent position in European energy diplomacy.

The broader context in which these negotiations are unfolding is one of considerable geopolitical fragility. Bosnia remains governed under the terms of the Dayton Agreement, the peace accord brokered by the United States in 1995 following a war that claimed roughly 100,000 lives. Ethnic and political tensions among the country's leaders have never fully subsided, and observers have warned that poorly managed external interference could destabilise those arrangements further.

A former senior American official with direct experience of the region has suggested that the involvement of administration-connected individuals in large economic projects has acquired a certain transactional logic under the current presidency, even if it remains, in that official's own words, deeply unsavoury. US diplomats are said to have communicated to Bosnian authorities, with some directness, that the Trump administration wishes to see AAFS's pipeline project approved — a signal that has not gone unnoticed in Sarajevo.