fairground

After a while we roll up to a children’s fairground.

“All the talk, that he’s an arm of the Kremlin, destabilising Moldova: that’s absolutely not true. This is the truth: what you see here,” he waves an arm towards the frozen fairground.

Emily Lanphear, vice chair of the local Republican Central Committee, ran a booth last month at the county fairground — complete with a giant photo of a bloodied Trump raising his fist after a July assassination attempt.

High-rise appartment blocks, a 150,000-capacity stadium, bowling alleys, department stores, a zoo, and a fairground are part of a faded Soviet-era cityscape of concrete monumentalism.

As the beige car bounced up to the former Soviet barracks, the rattling of its half-century old motor overpowered the din of people setting up for the day’s festivities at a temporary fairground.