ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — An Alaska man might have walked away as the biggest winner of last week’s high stakes summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage. He rode off with a new motorcycle, courtesy of the Russian government.
Putin’s delegation gifted Mark Warren, a retired fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage, a Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar, one week after a television crew’s interview with Warren went viral in Russia. The motorcycle company, founded in 1941 in western Siberia, now assembles its bikes in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, and distributes them through a team based in Woodinville, Washington.
Warren already owned one Ural motorcycle, purchased from a neighbor. He was out running errands on it a week before the summit when a Russian television crew saw him and asked for an interview.
Warren told the crew about his difficulty obtaining parts for the bike because of supply-and-demand issues.
“It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m really just a super-duper normal guy,” Warren said Tuesday. “They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural, and for some reason they think it’s cool.”
On Aug. 13, two days before the Trump-Putin summit to discuss the war in Ukraine, Warren received a call from the Russian journalist, who told him, “They’ve decided to give you a bike.”
Warren said a document he received indicated the gift was arranged through the Russian Embassy in the U.S., which did not immediately return a message Tuesday.
Warren said he initially thought it might be a scam. But after Putin and Trump departed Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson following their three-hour summit last Friday, he got another call informing him the bike was at the base.
He was directed to go to an Anchorage hotel the next day for the handoff. He went with his wife, and there in the parking lot, along with six men he assumed to be Russians, was the olive-green motorcycle, valued at $22,000.
“I dropped my jaw,” he said. “I went, ’You’ve got to be joking me.’”
All the Russians asked in return was to take his picture and interview him, he said: “If they want something from me, they’re gonna be sorely disappointed.”
Two reporters and someone from the consulate jumped on the bike with him, and he drove slowly around the parking lot while a cameraman ran alongside and filmed it.
The only reservation he had about taking the Ural is that he might somehow be implicated in some nefarious Russian scheme. Warren said he doesn’t want a “bunch of haters coming after me that I got a Russian motorcycle. … I don’t want this for my family.”
When he was signing the paperwork taking ownership of the motorcycle from the Russian embassy, he noticed it was manufactured Aug. 12.
“The obvious thing here is that it rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours,” he said.
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