.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — As world leaders have convened in Anchorage this week for the U.S.-Russia summit meeting, one Alaskan may have reason to feel like the event’s biggest winner. A retired fire inspector who rode to his house with the help of a new motorcycle from Vladimir Putin’s delegation. Ural, a company that has been manufacturing motorcycles since 1941 in Siberia but now does so in Kazakhstan, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mark Warren, a former fire inspector with the Municipality of Anchorage, received the new Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar in a parking lot this week as a surprise from the Russian government, as world leaders gathered in Anchorage for this week’s summit meeting.

The $22,000 motorcycle — an olive-green model built on Aug. 12 and delivered with uncommon speed — came as Warren, 67, was struggling to maintain the only Ural motorcycle he owned, a used model he had bought a few years ago from a neighbor.

Parts are not easy to find, he said, and demand for the machines outstrips supply. When a Russian television crew from a popular state-run travel channel asked him about his Ural, he said, he gave them an honest answer about the difficulties of keeping it running.

“It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m just a super-duper normal guy,” Warren said in an interview on Tuesday. “They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural, and for some reason they think it’s cool.”

He soon found out why. The next day, Aug. 13, two days before Trump and Putin were to meet in Anchorage to discuss the war in Ukraine, the Russian journalist who had interviewed Warren on Monday called to say the Russian government had decided to surprise him.

“They’ve decided to give you a bike,” Warren recalled the reporter saying.

Warren did not believe it. He was skeptical and thought it had to be a scam. He could not picture a circumstance in which a government, much less a foreign government, would just give him a free motorcycle.

But after the three-hour Trump-Putin meeting at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson that led to both men flying back to their home countries from Alaska, Warren received another call. He was told the motorcycle was already in Anchorage. “And they said, ‘Tomorrow, go to this hotel at this time,’ and that was it.”

On Aug. 14, Warren and his wife went to the hotel, not knowing what to expect. In the parking lot, he saw six men he assumed were Russian and the gleaming olive-green Ural Gear Up motorcycle sitting for him.

“I dropped my jaw,” Warren said. “I went, ‘You’ve got to be joking me.’”

The Russians, Warren said, wanted nothing more than to take his photo, interview him, and make a few minutes of video with him on the new motorcycle. Warren agreed. Two reporters and someone from the Russian consulate got in the sidecar, and Warren, with a cameraman jogging alongside him, circled the parking lot.

Warren, a retired fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage, had some qualms. “The only reservation I had is that I might somehow be implicated in some nefarious Russian scheme,” he said. “I don’t want a bunch of haters coming after me because I got a Russian motorcycle. … I don’t want this for my family.”

The only thing Warren signed, he said, was paperwork to take possession of the motorcycle from a representative of the Russian Embassy. The document showed he was correct about when it was manufactured — eight days after the first Trump-Putin summit since 2018 and a day before Warren learned about the gift — but was silent about where it had come from. Built in Kazakhstan, it had rolled off the showroom floor on Aug. 12.

“The obvious thing here is that it rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours,” Warren said.

A Russian national media outlet with millions of viewers, Rossiya-1 has no shortage of material to film, especially in the United States, where Putin’s government sees opportunities to change negative public perceptions. Driving around Alaska offers one such opportunity. The state has the second-longest Arctic coastline in the United States after Alaska. Along with scenic landscapes and adventure travel in such places as Denali National Park, Russians have shot videos of their travels around Alaska on helicopters and even snowmobiles.

Putin’s televised news conference in Alaska at the end of the Trump-Putin meeting also included a plug for Alaska tourism. “There are beautiful cities and villages, rivers, and nature. There’s a lot of nature,” Putin said at the news conference. “If you have the opportunity, you should visit Alaska.”

The channel, Rossiya 1, had interviewed Warren about his Ural motorcycle on Monday, Aug. 13. He never thought twice about it.

“I’m an average Joe who happens to ride a Ural,” Warren said. “I just happen to be average. I like to go out on my motorcycle. Nothing too extraordinary.”