Republika Srpska’s lobbyist told Washington this is about Christians. Her client’s record, its contract and its friends in Moscow say otherwise. The president protects Christians and makes peace with Muslim nations, and a client of his own advisers is asking him to choose a war between them.
Elmi Berisha| 9 October 2026
Caroline Wren is a registered lobbyist for Republika Srpska. On 7 October she told Axios why two of President Trump’s political advisers had been working for her client: “It’s not about Russia. It’s not about Putin. It’s about Christians who want their freedom and autonomy.” She called them “Pro-Trump Christians” who have been demonised by Brussels “for their Western values”.
I am a conservative, and the protection of Christians matters to me. So I checked her client.
It’s not about Putin. Five days before Bosnia’s election Vladimir Putin received Milorad Dodik in the Kremlin. On election night Dodik thanked him. Dodik’s appointee to the Senate of Republika Srpska is Aleksandar Vulin, who received Putin’s Order of Friendship from the head of Russian foreign intelligence. The party Vulin founded is listed as a co-initiator of Sovintern, a socialist international launched in Moscow on 27 April with a welcoming address from Putin. The American Communist Party was in the hall, and Sovintern’s website carries a statement accusing Israel of kidnapping activists bound for Gaza. Those are the Western values on offer.
Freedom and autonomy. Republika Srpska has had autonomy since 1995: its own president, government, parliament and police, guaranteed by the Dayton Accords, a peace negotiated on an American air base in Ohio. What its government is buying in Washington is something else. A four-million-dollar contract it signed last year with a Montreal firm states: “The independence of the Republic of Srpska from Bosnia Herzegovina is our ultimate goal.”
Congress has read that contract. On 27 March six senators, among them the Republicans Chuck Grassley, Roger Wicker and Thom Tillis, wrote to Secretaries Rubio and Bessent that Dodik’s government was directing lobbyists to advance independence, and argued that this met the test for sanctions under Section 8335 of the defence authorisation act the president signed in December. The law gave the administration ninety days. By the senators’ count the deadline passed on 18 March.
Christians. Here Ms. Wren’s client has a record in its own language. In July 1995 Ratko Mladić walked into Srebrenica and said on camera: “Finally, the time has come to take revenge on the Turks.” A UN tribunal called what followed genocide. Belgrade buried him last month with honours, and on 5 October Vulin opened his campaign for the Serbian presidency with a minute of silence for him. In August Aleksandar Vučić referred to NATO’s commander in Kosovo, a Turkish major general, as “the Turk”. On 11 September Dodik wrote that the attackers of 2001 had fought in Bosnia “against Serbs, Orthodox Christians” and “were preparing for a showdown with Christianity”. Ten days earlier Rod Blagojevich, a registered foreign agent for Republika Srpska, told a podcast that Bosnian Serbs faced “an infection of radical Islam”.
In that story the Christian cause is a war on the Muslims next door, and Americans are invited to take a side. It is sold to the part of the right that might buy it, which is why the label on the package reads “Pro-Trump Christians”.
President Trump’s record points the other way. He protects Christians and he makes peace with Muslim nations, and most of the American right sees no contradiction in that. The Abraham Accords are his. In September 2020, in the Oval Office, he announced that Muslim-majority Kosovo and Israel had agreed to establish diplomatic relations. They recognised each other the following February, and Kosovo opened its embassy in Jerusalem. Serbia promised at the same table to move its embassy there and never did. Kosovo’s officers have been helping to plan his Gaza stabilisation force since spring. This week Kosovo’s parliament elected a Catholic woman as president, and the country’s Mufti congratulated her. Christians in the Balkans who want freedom can look there.
Semafor reports that Alex Garcia of Continental, the firm’s only lobbyist for Republika Srpska, first approached Chris LaCivita about the trip and helped arrange his client’s meetings with White House officials. Sources told Semafor the advisers went to consult on voting equipment. The president wrote that if there was a conflict he would terminate his advisers immediately, and then said there was none.
The conflict is with his policy and with a law he signed. Congress asked Rubio and Bessent for a determination in March. Where is it? And the president is owed a better account of this client than “Pro-Trump Christians”.
A deal leaves both sides with something. Banja Luka wants the president’s name. In return it offers him a quarrel with his own peace record, with his own party’s senators and with his own signature. That is a con.
Elmi Berisha is a prominent Albanian-American community leader and businessman based in the New York area, best known as the President of the Pan-Albanian Federation of America "Vatra" (Federata Panshqiptare e Amerikës VATRA), the oldest Albanian patriotic organization in the United States, founded in 1912.
