The Chechen President’s Guns, Supercars, and $3,000,000 Motorcade

One of the guests at the deranged Caucasus wedding party with the AK–47-equipped Rolls–Royce was boxer-turned-warlord-turned-Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov (left). He’s one serious car guy. Lamborghini Reventón serious.

Kadyrov, an F430, and a ReventÃ³n Kadyrov is that rare species of Chechen president who happens to be not dead. His job is about as safe an occupation as an afternoon swim in a thunderstorm with pirañas while bleeding from a wound and wearing a lightning rod on the head. A selection of his predecessors from the past 15 years and their fates: Dzhokhar Dudayev (blown up by laser-guided missiles), Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev (blown up by car bomb), Aslan Maskhadov (blown up by grenade), his father Akhmad Kadyrov (blown up by bomb built into soccer stadium). Kadyrov Jr. is good friends with Vladimir Putin, which explains why he’s yet to be blown up.

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He appears to be the sort of man who lives life to the fullest, understandable given the explosive perils of his office. Living life to the fullest includes owning a fleet of supercars that includes one of the twenty $1.25M Lamborghini Reventóns ever made, a manageable feat in countries where the line between the personal funds of a president and the funds of the state is about as well-defined as a week-old contrail. Countries like Kadyrov’s Chechnya, which function like small versions of Putin’s Russia.

Kadyrov also has a thing for motorcades:

The Chechen President’s Guns, Supercars, and ,000,000 Motorcade

This cell phone video of his speeding caravan was shot in 2008. A Russian blogger took the trouble to identify all the cars. In chronological order: 2 BMW 530i’s, 3 Porsche Cayennes, 2 Mercedes–Benz S Classes, another 5 Cayennes, 7 Lexus LX 470’s, and a lone Cayenne and another LX 470 bringing up the rear. Total purchase price in Russia in 2008: $3,000,000

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It all makes perfect sense. If you stood a reasonable chance of being blown up by a nuclear missile from space at any moment, you wouldn’t keep your ~~country’s~~ money in government bonds, would you? Not when you can spend it on Lambos, guns, jetskis, bees, tigers, and t-shirts reading 2PSYCHO.