Along the way, we are told about U.S. diplomats’ ride in Gadzhi’s Rolls-Royce Phantom (“the legroom was somewhat constricted by the presence of a Kalashnikov carbine at our feet”), the wedding feast (“the cooks seemed to keep whole sheep and whole cows boiling in a cauldron somewhere day and night, dumping disjointed fragments of the carcass on the tables whenever someone entered the room”) and the entertainment (“Gadzhi’s main act, a Syrian-born singer named Avraam Russo, could not make it because he was shot a few days before the wedding”).

The embassy reported to Foggy Bottom that Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov “danced clumsily with his gold-plated automatic stuck down in the back of his jeans” and reportedly gave the bride and groom “a five-kilo lump of gold.” Ramzan threw $100 bills at the dancers, who “probably picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones.” But things took a dangerous turn when a “colonel sitting next to us, dead drunk, was highly insulted that we would not allow him to add ‘cognac’ to our wine.”

That’s gangster.