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Russian dissident and Putin critic Alexei Navalny warned of the dangers of a second Donald Trump term as president, calling the former commander-in-chief’s agenda ‘really scary’ in a prison letter to a friend.
In the message, first reported by The New York Times, Navalny wrote that if President Joe Biden suffered a health issue then ‘Trump will be come president… Doesn’t this obvious thing concern the Democrats?’
The activist was writing to photographer Evgeny Feldman when he spoke of his concerns, which demonstrated that despite being imprisoned in exile, he remained clued in to geopolitics.
‘Please name one current politician you admire,’ he asked Feldman in the conclusion of a letter about Trump wrote from the penal colony known as The Polar Wolf.
Meanwhile in bizarre remarks around Navalny’s death, Trump made no reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s role, instead using his platform to compare it to his own personal legal troubles.
‘The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our country. It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction,’ he wrote on TruthSocial.
Russian authorities said that the cause of Navalny’s death Friday at age 47 is still unknown — and the results of any investigation are likely to be questioned abroad. Many Western leaders have already said they hold Putin responsible for the death.
Navalny point out that should President Joe Biden suffer a health issue, Trump could easily win a second term
Alexei Navalny shared letters laced with dark humor, religious references and grim insights into prison life with a former gulag survivor, Natan Sharansky, in the year before he died, their newly-published notes reveal
Trump’s bizarre message comparing his legal troubles to Navalny’s death have been roundly criticized
In various speeches about possible foreign policy, Trump has said that his administration will not defend NATO members who don’t meet defense spending targets and that he would encourage Russia to attack member states who become delinquent.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov slammed the accusations from Western leaders as ‘boorish’ and ‘inadmissible.’
‘Those statements can’t do any harm to the head of our state, but they certainly aren’t becoming for those who make them,’ Peskov said in a call with reporters.
In response to the shocking statement, Rep. Nancy Pelosi told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki in an interview that his comments were ‘beneath the dignity of a human being.’
‘You wonder, what does Putin have on Donald Trump that he always has to be beholden to him, his buddy in vileness?,’ she saked.
‘It is so horrible you think, “No, somebody must have been. Not even Donald Trump could go this far,” This statement should disqualify him from running for anything, much less President of the United States.’
Trump’s comments came as Navalny’s widow vowed on Monday to continue his fight against the Kremlin, while authorities denied his mother access to a morgue where his body is believed to be held after his death.
With her voice cracking at times in a video posted on social media, Yulia Navalnaya accused Putin of killing her husband in the remote prison and alleged that officials’ refusal to hand over the body to her mother-in-law was part of a cover-up.
Navalny’s death has deprived the Russian opposition of is most well-known and inspiring politician less than a month before an election that is all but certain to give Putin another six years in power.
It dealt a devastating blow to many Russians, who had seen Navalny as a rare hope for political change amid Putin’s unrelenting crackdown on the opposition.
He had been imprisoned since January 2021 when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from a nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin.
He received three prison terms since his arrest, on a number of charges he has rejected as politically motivated.
‘They are cowardly and meanly hiding his body, refusing to give it to his mother and lying miserably while waiting for the trace of’ poison to disappear, Navalnaya said, suggesting her husband might have been killed with a Novichok-style nerve agent.
She urged Russians to rally behind her ‘to share not only the grief and endless pain that has enveloped and gripped us, but also my rage.’
She continued: ‘The main thing that we can do for Alexei and ourselves is to keep fighting. … We all need to get together in one strong fist and strike that mad regime.’
In other letters, Navalny exchanged deeply personal memos with Israel’s former deputy prime minister Sharansky, 76, in March and April 2023.
In his first note, he wrote ‘I hope I am the last to endure this’, less than a year before he was allegedly fatally poisoned with Novichok at a penal colony in Siberia on February 16, 2024.
Sharansky was held in a Moscow labor camp for nine years from 1978 after being denied permission to leave what was then the Soviet Union for Israel, and the two bonded over how little has changed in the brutal Russian prison system since.
Their historic friendship – memorialized in the letters obtained by The Free Press – was sparked by Navalny’s revelation that he read Sharansky’s memoir, Fear No Evil, in the gulag where he died.
