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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — When a Russian television crew pulled over Mark Warren last week and asked him about his motorcycle, he thought little of it. At most, he assumed it would be an afternoon fluke on a channel few Americans watched.

What Warren didn’t know was that he had become the Russian equivalent of an Internet celebrity. Thousands of miles from his adopted home in Alaska, Russians fawned over the spry 73-year-old on state television. He rode his dusty old motorcycle to run errands; he didn’t want for much in life; he had difficulties keeping the machine running because of the availability of parts. As he talked, his brown eyes flashed, and the director working with the journalist in dark shades said, “Oh my god, that’s it right there!”

For Warren, his modest rise to fame in Russia would result in one of the biggest windfalls of the week: a brand-new $22,000 motorcycle delivered to him, free of charge, from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government. The Anchorage Daily News was first to report the story Tuesday afternoon.

In a week consumed by the spectacle of the Trump-Putin summit at a downtown hotel, in which the two leaders sparred over the war in Ukraine, it is hard to name a winner. But it might just be the man who received the unexpected gift from Russia: an Alaska man who spent his life as a fire inspector with the Municipality of Anchorage.

The $22,000 Motorcycle Gift

Warren’s new motorcycle is a Ural Gear Up with sidecar, olive green, built Aug. 12 and whisked thousands of miles from a Russian factory to Anchorage in two days. Ural first made motorcycles in western Siberia in 1941. It now assembles them in Petropavlovsk in Kazakhstan and markets them to customers in the United States with a team based in Woodinville, Wash.

Warren already had one Ural motorcycle: a used one he bought from a neighbor. He said he had issues keeping it maintained and running in Anchorage, so when the Russians asked how he liked his Ural, he said that’s what he told them.

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

Warren said after his interview, he went on with his day. But when the phone rang three days later on Aug. 13, just two days before the summit, he was in for a shock: The Russian journalist who had interviewed him in Anchorage wanted to talk.

“I’m sure I just didn’t believe it, but they have decided to give you a bike,” Warren recalled the reporter saying. “Like, literally a bike.”

Warren said he thought it was a joke at first. “They gave me a motorcycle? C’mon. … Nobody just gives you a motorcycle, that’s just not something you just get for free.”

When the summit ended with the leaders leaving Alaska on Wednesday after three hours at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Warren got another call, telling him the motorcycle was in Anchorage.

Warren and his wife went to the hotel the next day and found six men whom he guessed were Russians, along with the olive green Ural Gear Up motorcycle in the parking lot. “I dropped my jaw,” he said. “I went, ‘You’ve got to be joking me.’”

The Russians asked to take his picture, interview him, and film him straddling the motorcycle. He obliged, as two reporters and someone from the Russian consulate climbed into the sidecar while he drove in circles in the hotel parking lot with a cameraman jogging alongside him.

Warren said he did not sign any documents saying he was now beholden to Russia, or, for that matter, any declarations as to how he received the motorcycle. “The only thing I signed was the pink slip at the Russian Embassy to take title to the motorcycle,” Warren said. The document he received said the motorcycle was made Aug. 12 and delivered the next day to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. “The obvious thing here is that it rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours,” Warren said.

He said he wasn’t certain he wanted the motorcycle from a foreign government. “The only reservation I had is that I might somehow be implicated in some nefarious Russian scheme,” Warren 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.”

Warren was riding the old motorcycle on the day it all happened, back from the hotel parking lot, when the reporter who had been in Anchorage called again.

“She said, ‘I don’t know if you realize it, but you are an Alaska celebrity,” Warren said.