- calendar_today August 9, 2025
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A week that saw U.S. President Donald Trump in Anchorage for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin has most likely left one man standing as the biggest winner.
It’s a retired fire inspector who just happened to be on his motorcycle running errands when a Russian television reporter pulled over to ask him a few questions about the machine and some other things. Mark Warren said he would not have expected all the attention he got from his brief interview, which went viral in Russia, let alone a $22,000 gift from the Russian government.
Warren said he was driving home Tuesday when a call from a Russian journalist “blew me away.”
“They’ve decided to give you a bike,” the journalist said in an Aug. 13 telephone call. Warren told her No way. “Freebies just don’t fall into your lap like that.”
He had not heard of the TV reporter, he said. He does not read Russian media, he said. But after that Aug. 13 call, there was a second call two days after the three-hour summit between Trump and Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. This time, Warren was told, the motorcycle had landed in Anchorage. Warren, who had a second-hand Ural that he bought from his neighbor and said he had problems keeping on the road because of parts availability and demand, said he is not a collector. When the Russian reporter interviewed him, he said, he simply answered her questions. The problem was maintaining the machine, Warren said.
The instructions were simple: Go to a hotel the next day. The two went and found in the parking lot six men, Warren said he assumed were Russians, with the olive-green Ural Gear Up motorcycle also in a sidecar.
“I dropped my jaw,” Warren said. “I went, ‘You’ve got to be joking me.’”
He said the Russians wanted little in exchange for the bike. Take a photograph, interview him, and do some video. Warren said Sure. Two reporters and another man, from the Russian consulate, got on the sidecar. Warren did a few laps, a cameraman running behind.
“Now, it does make me feel a little apprehensive to accept a gift from a foreign government,” Warren said. “It’s Russia, that’s the one we have our problems with, so. …”
He added, “The only reservation I had is that I might somehow be implicated in some nefarious Russian scheme. I don’t want a bunch of haters coming after me that I got a Russian motorcycle. … I don’t want this for my family.”
The only paper he signed, Warren said, is the necessary form to take ownership of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy. That document, he said, showed the bike was manufactured Aug. 12. It was that simple, he said.
“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 a second-hand Ural that he bought from his neighbor and said he had problems keeping on the road because of parts availability and demand, said he is not a collector. When the Russian reporter interviewed him, he said, he simply answered her questions. The problem was maintaining the machine, Warren said.
“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 Tuesday. “They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural, and for some reason they think it’s cool.”
