Last month, we launched The Free Press Book Club, in which one of our writers recommends a new book they love along with a classic work from the past echoing its themes.

In May, Nellie Bowles praised P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores—and the joys of political satire—and paired it with, what else? Her own book, Morning After the Revolution. (Did we mention it became a New York Times bestseller?)

Today, Free Press columnist Peter Savodnik picks Triumph of the Yuppies by Tom McGrath, who argues that the rise of the “young urban professional” in the ’80s corrupted America for good. Peter is matching this book with the classic Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, who became the unofficial “spokesman for the yuppies” after publishing his breakout novel in 1984.

Below, you’ll find an essay from Peter about how yuppies came to be such an influential and corrosive force in our culture—ultimately leading to the election (and possible reelection) of Donald Trump. And if you’re a paid subscriber, we have a special treat for you. At the end of this piece, you can watch Peter in conversation with Tom McGrath and Jay McInerney about the legacy of the yuppie. They discuss Boomers, Wall Street, the culture of consumerism, a few questions from Free Press readers, and ultimately, they answer the bigger question: What can yuppies teach us about America today?

If you’re not already a paid subscriber, become one now to join our monthly book club. You can watch Peter’s conversation, comment on this essay, and get invited to future in-person book club events. (More on that later!):

Subscribe now

Meanwhile, send us your thoughts about yuppies at books@thefp.com, and consider buying Bright Lights, Big City and Triumph of the Yuppies from the good people at Bookshop, where every purchase through these links earns a commission for The Free Press. Or if you’re an Amazon customer, click here for Tom’s book or here for Jay’s.

And now, here’s Peter on the Triumph of the Yuppies:

My wife and I were at a dinner party a few months ago, in the Hills, in Los Angeles. 

Everyone was in their late 40s or early 50s, and there was a weariness that permeated the conversation—no one wanted to talk about the election, or the border, or China, or AI, or the encampments, or even Ozempic (which, I suspect, two or three people there were injecting regularly). Instead, we talked around the news. There was a vague longing for The Great Before. Before the screens, the brands, the narratives, the curators, the audience-builders. Before there was a conspiracy theory, or theories, swirling around literally everything.

The Great Before—“the time before everyone went crazy,” as our host put it—is the quasi-mythological, prelapsarian America we grew up in: the ’80s. 

This is the thing you need to bear in mind about the ’80s: the gargantuan, unapologetic success of it all.

It wasn’t just about money. It was about ostentatiousness, and, really, the celebration of ostentatiousness. “Material Girl” was a hit. Family Ties was a hit. Working Girl was a hit, with its famous, wince-inducing line, uttered by Melanie Griffith: “I have a head for a business and a bod for sin—is there anything wrong with that?” 

It was also about the American Dream—which had been battered by Vietnam, stagflation, crime, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian storming of the U.S. embassy—suddenly rising once again. It was morning in America, as Ronald Reagan reminded us, and the problem was not us, but the communists and big government.

The subtext of all this amounted to an updated social Darwinism: our things were a testament to our national superiority, and our duty as Americans was to keep acquiring them. If we didn’t, could we really say we were superior to everyone else?

All of which is to say that it was not a terribly introspective moment.

Had it been more introspective, we might have realized that the rampant materialism of the yuppie led to a division that now threatens to undo our republic. 

That is the suggestion of my Free Press Book Club pick today: Tom McGrath’s Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation. While a lot of people made a great deal of money in the ’80s, McGrath writes that the era also fundamentally changed the country for the worse. And we are still living inside that country—whether we realize it or not. 

Specifically, he argues that America, “in its push to revive itself, in its zeal to recapture the dominance and prosperity of the postwar era,” ultimately ended up “elevating self-interest over any sense of the common good.” In short, “the country had created a new economic and social order that wouldn’t easily be undone.”

We all know what the yuppie looks like—he’s the guy in the Hugo Boss power suit with the pocket square, the Rolex, the monogrammed silk suspenders, crushing it with his fellow investment bankers, throwing back gin buck cocktails at the Harvard Club. 

But where did this chump, with his unslakable shallowness, come from?

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, immediately prior to the rise of the yuppie, there was—imagine this, young people of 2024!—a great deal of anxiety about the future.

“The economic burden fell particularly hard on the Baby Boom generation, who were twice as likely to be unemployed as their parents had been in the ’50s and who, even if they had jobs, hardly felt like they were getting ahead,” McGrath writes. Adjusted for inflation, he notes, young people’s salaries actually decreased by $300 annually from 1970 to 1980.

This anxiety, he argues, led to a renewed focus on money and ambition and making all the right decisions—about where one went to school, what one majored in, where one moved after college.

Or who one married, according to the yuppies quoted in McGrath’s book.

Like 28-year-old Robert Drumheller, who told Newsweek in 1981, that “it was very important for me to marry a professional person. One of my goals was to have a high standard of living, and with two incomes you get to the easy life much faster.”

All of a sudden, there was a race for jobs and promotions and spouses, and a relatively small number of young people surged ahead. In 1985, the Chicago Tribune estimated there were 4.2 million yuppies, or 5 percent of all Baby Boomers. Everyone else had been left behind. The era of shared, widespread, upward mobility that had characterized the ’50s and ’60s and petered out in the ’70s, was officially over.

Yuppie America, McGrath told me, was “where you really start to see this divide in America along economic and educational lines.”

It was in May 1980 that the journalist Dan Rottenberg, writing in Chicago magazine, coined the term yuppie, McGrath writes. 

But it would take a few years before the public really became aware of this phenomenon—and before the phenomenon became aware of itself.

Then, in September 1984, Vintage Books published Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, catapulting McInerney—then 29 and living on Manhattan’s Lower East Side—into something of a star.

“I woke up one morning right after the book was published,” McInerney told me, “and it was published to very little fanfare initially, but The Wall Street Journal picked up on it very quickly, and they announced that I was the spokesman for the yuppies, which kind of horrified me.”

Interestingly, the term yuppie never appears in Bright Lights, Big City. In 1983, when he wrote the novel, it was not yet popular; by the time the novel came out, McInerney said, “We were deep in the middle of this thing.”

In Bright Lights, McInerney’s unnamed, second-person protagonist, who inhabits the periphery of the yuppie universe, offers the first vivid account of this emergent, slightly horrifying species.

On the one hand, he is a New Yorker fact-checker and an aspiring novelist who fashions himself a man of letters—definitely not a yuppie. On the other hand, McInerney said, the protagonist’s best friend-slash-coke dealer, Tad Allagash, “has really no values except having more fun than everybody else and looking good while doing it, so there’s no question that I was chronicling that world.”

After Bright Lights, Big City took off—Triumph of the Yuppies notes that it sold 10,000 copies in its first three weeks and New York City bookstores couldn’t keep it in stock—McInerney had to change his phone number.

“People were calling me up to ask me advice on how to get to these various places” that he wrote about in the novel, “including quite a number that I just made up,” McInerney said. “There is no Lizard Lounge, but a lot of people wanted to know what street it was on.”

McInerney told me the new yuppie materialism amounted to “a rejection of parental values”—TV dinners, the suburbs, all the assumptions that had governed postwar, middle-class life.

What distinguished this boom time from previous boom times, McGrath added, was not simply the ferocity with which yuppies went about buying their Porsches and Cuisinarts and Julian Schnabel paintings and pretty much everything at Sharper Image. It was the nature of the materialism itself. 

Earlier generations of Americans had subscribed to an “inclusive materialism,” McGrath told me—it was “a keeping up with the Joneses era,” when everyone shopped at Sears. But for yuppies, “it’s more of an exclusive materialism. ‘I’m going to own this thing, because most people do not have it, and it’s a way of setting myself apart, as opposed to a way of being part of the community.’ ” 

“A new generation of young professionals wanted something more, something less common. The buzzword that people started using was quality. The things they purchased would be, like the lives they were trying to create for themselves, excellent.”

By 1985, the anti-yuppie backlash had begun. DIE YUPPIE SCUM started to appear on buildings and streetlamps downtown.

Then, on October 19, 1987, the stock market crashed—with the Dow Jones losing nearly 23 percent of its value, or $500 billion, in a single day. The era of the yuppie was apparently dead.

McInerney smirked when I suggested as much. “Yuppie culture is like the undead,” he told me. “It persisted and thrived and metamorphosed.” 

In fact, both authors noted that the spirit of the yuppie is now alive and well in the ur-yuppie known as Donald Trump. Ironically, his 2016 election came about, McGrath writes, because “families at the top of the economic pyramid controlled 79 percent of all wealth in America, up from 60 percent in the 1980s.”

By then, the long-percolating anti-yuppie sentiment in blue-collar America had curdled into an angrier anti-elitism.

And the billionaire Donald Trump “somehow persuaded many working-class Americans that he was on their side.”

I loved talking to both of these writers and reading Triumph of the Yuppies and rereading Bright Lights, Big City. If you’d like to learn more about New York in the go-go ’80s, Ivan Boesky, Tad Allagash, the story behind the rise of Madonna, and Bolivian Marching Powder (read the novel, people), scroll down:

To listen to Peter’s discussion with Tom McGrath and Jay McInerney, become a subscriber today. You’ll also be able to continue the conversation in the comments.

Subscribe now

Read more

Last month, we launched The Free Press Book Club, in which one of our writers recommends a new book they love along with a classic work from the past echoing its themes.

In May, Nellie Bowles praised P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores—and the joys of political satire—and paired it with, what else? Her own book, Morning After the Revolution. (Did we mention it became a New York Times bestseller?)

Today, Free Press columnist Peter Savodnik picks Triumph of the Yuppies by Tom McGrath, who argues that the rise of the “young urban professional” in the ’80s corrupted America for good. Peter is matching this book with the classic Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, who became the unofficial “spokesman for the yuppies” after publishing his breakout novel in 1984.

Below, you’ll find an essay from Peter about how yuppies came to be such an influential and corrosive force in our culture—ultimately leading to the election (and possible reelection) of Donald Trump. And if you’re a paid subscriber, we have a special treat for you. At the end of this piece, you can watch Peter in conversation with Tom McGrath and Jay McInerney about the legacy of the yuppie. They discuss Boomers, Wall Street, the culture of consumerism, a few questions from Free Press readers, and ultimately, they answer the bigger question: What can yuppies teach us about America today?

If you’re not already a paid subscriber, become one now to join our monthly book club. You can watch Peter’s conversation, comment on this essay, and get invited to future in-person book club events. (More on that later!):

Subscribe now

Meanwhile, send us your thoughts about yuppies at books@thefp.com, and consider buying Bright Lights, Big City and Triumph of the Yuppies from the good people at Bookshop, where every purchase through these links earns a commission for The Free Press. Or if you’re an Amazon customer, click here for Tom’s book or here for Jay’s.

And now, here’s Peter on the Triumph of the Yuppies:

My wife and I were at a dinner party a few months ago, in the Hills, in Los Angeles. 

Everyone was in their late 40s or early 50s, and there was a weariness that permeated the conversation—no one wanted to talk about the election, or the border, or China, or AI, or the encampments, or even Ozempic (which, I suspect, two or three people there were injecting regularly). Instead, we talked around the news. There was a vague longing for The Great Before. Before the screens, the brands, the narratives, the curators, the audience-builders. Before there was a conspiracy theory, or theories, swirling around literally everything.

The Great Before—“the time before everyone went crazy,” as our host put it—is the quasi-mythological, prelapsarian America we grew up in: the ’80s. 

This is the thing you need to bear in mind about the ’80s: the gargantuan, unapologetic success of it all.

It wasn’t just about money. It was about ostentatiousness, and, really, the celebration of ostentatiousness. “Material Girl” was a hit. Family Ties was a hit. Working Girl was a hit, with its famous, wince-inducing line, uttered by Melanie Griffith: “I have a head for a business and a bod for sin—is there anything wrong with that?” 

It was also about the American Dream—which had been battered by Vietnam, stagflation, crime, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian storming of the U.S. embassy—suddenly rising once again. It was morning in America, as Ronald Reagan reminded us, and the problem was not us, but the communists and big government.

The subtext of all this amounted to an updated social Darwinism: our things were a testament to our national superiority, and our duty as Americans was to keep acquiring them. If we didn’t, could we really say we were superior to everyone else?

All of which is to say that it was not a terribly introspective moment.

Had it been more introspective, we might have realized that the rampant materialism of the yuppie led to a division that now threatens to undo our republic. 

That is the suggestion of my Free Press Book Club pick today: Tom McGrath’s Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation. While a lot of people made a great deal of money in the ’80s, McGrath writes that the era also fundamentally changed the country for the worse. And we are still living inside that country—whether we realize it or not. 

Specifically, he argues that America, “in its push to revive itself, in its zeal to recapture the dominance and prosperity of the postwar era,” ultimately ended up “elevating self-interest over any sense of the common good.” In short, “the country had created a new economic and social order that wouldn’t easily be undone.”

We all know what the yuppie looks like—he’s the guy in the Hugo Boss power suit with the pocket square, the Rolex, the monogrammed silk suspenders, crushing it with his fellow investment bankers, throwing back gin buck cocktails at the Harvard Club. 

But where did this chump, with his unslakable shallowness, come from?

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, immediately prior to the rise of the yuppie, there was—imagine this, young people of 2024!—a great deal of anxiety about the future.

“The economic burden fell particularly hard on the Baby Boom generation, who were twice as likely to be unemployed as their parents had been in the ’50s and who, even if they had jobs, hardly felt like they were getting ahead,” McGrath writes. Adjusted for inflation, he notes, young people’s salaries actually decreased by $300 annually from 1970 to 1980.

This anxiety, he argues, led to a renewed focus on money and ambition and making all the right decisions—about where one went to school, what one majored in, where one moved after college.

Or who one married, according to the yuppies quoted in McGrath’s book.

Like 28-year-old Robert Drumheller, who told Newsweek in 1981, that “it was very important for me to marry a professional person. One of my goals was to have a high standard of living, and with two incomes you get to the easy life much faster.”

All of a sudden, there was a race for jobs and promotions and spouses, and a relatively small number of young people surged ahead. In 1985, the Chicago Tribune estimated there were 4.2 million yuppies, or 5 percent of all Baby Boomers. Everyone else had been left behind. The era of shared, widespread, upward mobility that had characterized the ’50s and ’60s and petered out in the ’70s, was officially over.

Yuppie America, McGrath told me, was “where you really start to see this divide in America along economic and educational lines.”

It was in May 1980 that the journalist Dan Rottenberg, writing in Chicago magazine, coined the term yuppie, McGrath writes. 

But it would take a few years before the public really became aware of this phenomenon—and before the phenomenon became aware of itself.

Then, in September 1984, Vintage Books published Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, catapulting McInerney—then 29 and living on Manhattan’s Lower East Side—into something of a star.

“I woke up one morning right after the book was published,” McInerney told me, “and it was published to very little fanfare initially, but The Wall Street Journal picked up on it very quickly, and they announced that I was the spokesman for the yuppies, which kind of horrified me.”

Interestingly, the term yuppie never appears in Bright Lights, Big City. In 1983, when he wrote the novel, it was not yet popular; by the time the novel came out, McInerney said, “We were deep in the middle of this thing.”

In Bright Lights, McInerney’s unnamed, second-person protagonist, who inhabits the periphery of the yuppie universe, offers the first vivid account of this emergent, slightly horrifying species.

On the one hand, he is a New Yorker fact-checker and an aspiring novelist who fashions himself a man of letters—definitely not a yuppie. On the other hand, McInerney said, the protagonist’s best friend-slash-coke dealer, Tad Allagash, “has really no values except having more fun than everybody else and looking good while doing it, so there’s no question that I was chronicling that world.”

After Bright Lights, Big City took off—Triumph of the Yuppies notes that it sold 10,000 copies in its first three weeks and New York City bookstores couldn’t keep it in stock—McInerney had to change his phone number.

“People were calling me up to ask me advice on how to get to these various places” that he wrote about in the novel, “including quite a number that I just made up,” McInerney said. “There is no Lizard Lounge, but a lot of people wanted to know what street it was on.”

McInerney told me the new yuppie materialism amounted to “a rejection of parental values”—TV dinners, the suburbs, all the assumptions that had governed postwar, middle-class life.

What distinguished this boom time from previous boom times, McGrath added, was not simply the ferocity with which yuppies went about buying their Porsches and Cuisinarts and Julian Schnabel paintings and pretty much everything at Sharper Image. It was the nature of the materialism itself. 

Earlier generations of Americans had subscribed to an “inclusive materialism,” McGrath told me—it was “a keeping up with the Joneses era,” when everyone shopped at Sears. But for yuppies, “it’s more of an exclusive materialism. ‘I’m going to own this thing, because most people do not have it, and it’s a way of setting myself apart, as opposed to a way of being part of the community.’ ” 

“A new generation of young professionals wanted something more, something less common. The buzzword that people started using was quality. The things they purchased would be, like the lives they were trying to create for themselves, excellent.”

By 1985, the anti-yuppie backlash had begun. DIE YUPPIE SCUM started to appear on buildings and streetlamps downtown.

Then, on October 19, 1987, the stock market crashed—with the Dow Jones losing nearly 23 percent of its value, or $500 billion, in a single day. The era of the yuppie was apparently dead.

McInerney smirked when I suggested as much. “Yuppie culture is like the undead,” he told me. “It persisted and thrived and metamorphosed.” 

In fact, both authors noted that the spirit of the yuppie is now alive and well in the ur-yuppie known as Donald Trump. Ironically, his 2016 election came about, McGrath writes, because “families at the top of the economic pyramid controlled 79 percent of all wealth in America, up from 60 percent in the 1980s.”

By then, the long-percolating anti-yuppie sentiment in blue-collar America had curdled into an angrier anti-elitism.

And the billionaire Donald Trump “somehow persuaded many working-class Americans that he was on their side.”

I loved talking to both of these writers and reading Triumph of the Yuppies and rereading Bright Lights, Big City. If you’d like to learn more about New York in the go-go ’80s, Ivan Boesky, Tad Allagash, the story behind the rise of Madonna, and Bolivian Marching Powder (read the novel, people), scroll down:

To listen to Peter’s discussion with Tom McGrath and Jay McInerney, become a subscriber today. You’ll also be able to continue the conversation in the comments.

Subscribe now

Read more

There is huge news today: in the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron defense doctrine that underpins the administrative state. 

I am putting that down as a marker because I’ve had a very busy week of travel and writing (the paperback edition of Democracy Awakening is coming out in October and I am working on a new afterword) and I am just too tired to cover it and its history well tonight. 

Instead, tonight I want to make a note of something that has been nagging at me for weeks now: Trump’s focus on 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested by Russian officers in March 2023 and is currently on trial for the trumped-up charge of espionage. The State Department considers him “wrongfully detained,” a rare designation indicating that the person is being held by a hostile government as a bargaining chip. That designation means the U.S. government will do all it can to secure his release. 

At least three times now, Trump has interfered with those negotiations by vowing that Russian president Vladimir Putin will release Gershkovich for him and him alone. He said it in last night’s CNN debacle, where he also made a big deal out of the idea that Putin will do it as a favor, without an exchange of money.  

He said something else last night in his slurry of words that jumped out. Somewhere in his discussion of Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in February 2022, Trump said: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager and then conduit to Russian operatives, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.” 

Manafort had helped to get the pro-Russian oligarch Yanukovych into office, and when Yanukovych fled to Russia after the Ukrainian people threw him out, Manafort was left unemployed and in debt to other oligarchs. When he went to work for Trump, for free, he promptly wrote to his partner Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee identified in 2020 as a Russian operative, asking how “we” could use the appointment “to get whole,” and made sure that the Russian oligarch to whom he owed the most money knew about his close connection with the Trump campaign (p. 135). 

The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine” (p. 140). The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that carved off much of Ukraine and made it subservient to him. This was the dead opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if only Trump were elected….

And, in November 2016, he was.

According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Manafort’s partner and Russian operative Kilimnick wrote that “[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.” Following that, Kilimnik suggested that Manafort ‘could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals.’ The email also suggested that once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration’” (p. 99).

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.

In last night’s debate, Trump insisted that Putin never would have invaded Ukraine on his watch (although Putin in fact continued his 2014 assault during Trump’s term, and Trump tried to withhold support for Ukraine). 

After Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Jim Rutenberg published a terrific and thorough review of this history in the New York Times Magazine, pointing out that Putin’s attack on Ukraine looked different with this history behind it. Once Biden took office in 2021, the many efforts of the people around Trump, including most obviously Rudy Giuliani, to influence Ukrainian politics through their ties to the White House were over. 

“Thirteen months later,” Rutenberg wrote, “Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian frontier.” Once his troops were there, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.   

Last night, Trump claimed that the Ukrainians are losing the war and described how sad it was that their country is being destroyed (without mentioning that it is Putin’s unprovoked war that is doing that damage). He also significantly exaggerated how much money the U.S. has contributed to Ukraine’s defense. 

That misrepresentation lines up with Putin’s offer of Friday, June 14, 2024, in a “peace proposal” to Ukraine: Ukraine would give up Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, including far more territory than Putin’s troops occupy, in exchange for a ceasefire. Putin said, “If Kyiv and the Western capitals refuse it, as before, then in the end, that’s their…political and moral responsibility for the continuation of bloodshed.” He also demanded an end to all sanctions and that Ukraine abandon its plan to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). (Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky rejected the plan and noted that there is no reason to think Putin will stop his land grab once his forces regroup.) 

So when Trump last night said about the 2022 invasion, “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream,” it sounded as if he had been in on the Mariupol Plan. And when he talked about how the war needed to end, especially in light of Putin’s recent “peace” plan, it sounded as if perhaps he still is. 

And he promised, yet again, that he and he alone could get Gershkovich released.

—

Notes:

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/26/nx-s1-5019408/american-journalist-evan-gershkovich-is-on-trial-for-espionage-in-russia

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/evan-gershkovich-wall-street-journal-reporter-wrongfully-detained-russia-what-does-that-mean/

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf

https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/dl

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/06/14/vladimir-putin-demands-war-ukraine/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/11/russia-to-hold-presidential-election-in-annexed-ukrainian-regions-interfax

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-says-russian-held-regions-ukraine-endorse-their-choice-join-moscow-2023-09-29/

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