A registered office on a graffitied Sarajevo backstreet serves as the unlikely headquarters of AAFS Infrastructure and Energy, a company that is understood to be on the verge of securing contracts worth more than one billion dollars to build and operate a gas pipeline across the Balkans — a corridor intended to replace Russian fossil fuel supplies with American ones. What the firm appears to lack in relevant experience, it is widely reported to compensate for through its personal connections to the Trump administration: one representative is a Washington lawyer who has acted for the Trump family in election-related litigation, while another is the brother of the president's former national security adviser, both having been involved in efforts to contest the 2020 presidential election result. Bosnian officials, several of whom requested anonymity given the sensitivity of ongoing negotiations, have described the project as potentially the most consequential infrastructure undertaking in the country's modern history. 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 concession came to be advanced with such apparent urgency.

The broader context lends the negotiations a significance that extends well beyond commercial interests. Bosnia remains a fragile state whose ethnic divisions are still actively exploited by rival political factions, and whose stability rests in part on the peace framework brokered by the United States in 1995 following a war in which an estimated 100,000 people were killed. US officials are reported to have made clear to Bosnian counterparts that Washington expects the AAFS concession to proceed.