Behind a white door on a graffiti-covered backstreet in Sarajevo, past an overgrown garden that would not suggest corporate ambition, sits the registered office of AAFS Infrastructure and Energy. The company has no documented history of delivering a project even fractionally comparable in scale to what it is now pursuing: a concession potentially worth more than $1 billion to build and operate a gas pipeline across the Balkans, designed to carry liquefied natural gas shipped from the United States and to displace supplies that have historically flowed from Russia. What AAFS does possess, according to a Guardian investigation drawing on leaked documents, corporate filings, and interviews with current and former officials on two continents, is proximity to power. One of its representatives is a Washington attorney who has handled legal work for the Trump family in political disputes.

The other is the brother of the president's former national security adviser. Both individuals were involved in efforts to challenge the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election — a cause that remains central to Donald Trump's political identity. It is a set of credentials that, in the current geopolitical climate, appears to carry more weight than a balance sheet. The stakes in the western Balkans extend well beyond the question of who profits.

Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a fragile state, still shaped by the 1995 peace agreement that ended a war in which approximately 100,000 people were killed, among them Muslim Bosniak civilians massacred by Serb paramilitary forces.