Navalny issued chilling warning about second Trump term in final letters from prison

Alexei Navalny issued a chilling warning about what a second presidential term for Donald Trump could mean in one of his final letters before he died in an Arctic prison last week.

<a target="_blank" href=«https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/19/world/europe/navalny-letters-<a» https:>Vladmir Putin

also read voraciously from Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn to occupy his mind and prevent himself from sinking into despair amid the brutal conditions in which he was held.

In one 3 December letter to Evgeny Feldman, a photographer who covered his attempted run for president in 2018 and now lives in exile in Latvia, Navalny wrote that he feared that if anything should happen to President Joe Biden – a distinct possibility, he felt, given the American’s advanced age – “Trump will become president”.

To Navalny, a second Mr Trump term was a “really scary” prospect for the wider world.

“Doesn’t this obvious thing concern the Democrats?” he asked Mr Feldman, apparently incredulous that 81-year-old Mr Biden is pursuing a second term rather than yielding to a younger successor to take on Mr Trump, who looks all but certain to be the Republican nominee again this year.

Elsewhere in the correspondence, Navalny expressed a nostalgia for spicy foreign cuisine like the Turkish kebabs he enjoyed while recuperating in Berlin, Germany, after being poisoned with Novichok.

He also wrote about how moved he had been after reading an obituary of the Friends actor Matthew Perry and told Mr Feldman: “Everyone usually thinks that I really need pathetic and heartbreaking words but I really miss the daily grind – news about life, food, salaries, gossip.”

Of the unthinking obedience of his captors, he ominously told another friend, media