- calendar_today August 9, 2025
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — On a week when President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin got the world’s attention with their summit here in Anchorage, the person who may have come out ahead of them all may be a retired fire inspector whose day of running errands on his motorcycle took a turn for the international — and led to a $22,000 surprise gift from the Russian government.
Mark Warren, a former fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage, had no idea that a random chat with a Russian television news crew would go viral in Russia, much less lead to a surprise visit from a delegation with a shiny new motorcycle for him.
It’s an olive-green Ural Gear Up with a sidecar, one made on August 12.
Ural was founded in western Siberia in 1941, but these days the motorcycles are assembled in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, and then shipped to the United States for distribution from a team in Woodinville, Washington.
Warren already had one Ural, which was a used motorcycle he purchased from a neighbor. But Warren said it’s been challenging to maintain and keep it running, since parts are not readily available and oftentimes demand outstrips supply.
But on his way back from running errands, Warren said the Russian TV crew came up beside him and asked him questions for an interview. He said he told them that he enjoyed the bike but wished it were easier to maintain.
“It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m just a super-duper normal guy,” Warren recalled in an interview Tuesday. “They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural, and for some reason they think it’s cool.”
Warren said he thought nothing more of it until a Russian journalist who had done the initial interview called him two days before the Trump-Putin summit — a day devoted to discussion about the war in Ukraine — and left a simple message:
“They’ve decided to give you a bike,” Warren said the journalist told him.
At first, Warren said he thought it was a scam. A free motorcycle? Who gets those? He was prepared to just thank the journalist and then go about his business.
But two days after the summit — Trump and Putin met for three hours at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson before they left Alaska — the Russian journalist called again and told Warren that the motorcycle was already in Anchorage.
The man was told to simply go to a local hotel the following day.
“We drove over there and we’re kind of standing there and I didn’t know what to think,” Warren said. “In the parking lot, there were six people, probably Russians, and the bike, the Ural Gear Up.”
Warren said he dropped his jaw.
“I went, ‘You’ve got to be joking me,’” Warren said.
He said the Russians asked to take his picture and interview him once more, then shoot a few minutes of video of him next to the motorcycle.
Warren agreed, and two reporters, along with someone he identified as an attache from the Russian consulate, piled into the sidecar while he slowly drove in circles in the parking lot, with a cameraman running alongside to get video of the moment.
But he also said he didn’t trust it, either. Accepting a gift from a foreign government has always made Warren a little queasy, especially when it’s one as politically fraught as Russia. “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.”
He said he signed some paperwork to take possession of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy, but that’s it. The only document he signed, according to Warren, showed the date the bike was manufactured. It was made on August 12.
“The obvious thing here is that it rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours,” Warren said.
Warren, who had been considering just what to do with his neighbor’s old motorcycle, said he was a little reluctant to accept the new one at first, but said he’s since become glad to have it.
The $22,000 motorcycle was a pleasant surprise for the former Anchorage fire inspector who just wanted to go for a ride when it all began.
“It’s not that we wanted this bike or wanted this to happen,” Warren said. “We were just kind of thrilled that we have it and grateful that we have it.”
