Summit Side Story: Alaskan Man Gets Motorcycle From Putin

Summit Side Story: Alaskan Man Gets Motorcycle From Putin
  • calendar_today August 9, 2025
  • News

.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — While U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Anchorage this week for their high-stakes summit, an Anchorage man may have benefited most from their visit.

Mark Warren, a retired fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage, rode off on a brand-new motorcycle from the Russians and possibly a $22,000 gift from the Russian government. It all began with a simple roadside interview as he rode his motorcycle to run errands. He never imagined it would attract the international attention it did in Russia when the interview he did for a Russian television crew went viral. The sidecar, too, has been ordered, Warren said.

The bike Warren received was a Ural Gear Up motorcycle with sidecar — an olive-green version built Aug. 12 and delivered in short order. Ural, founded in western Siberia in 1941, now has its final assembly in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, while distribution in the United States is based in Woodinville, Washington.

Warren already had a Ural, a used one he bought from a neighbor. But, he said, just keeping it running was an ordeal. Parts are tough to get, and demand far outstrips supply. When the TV reporter asked him how he liked it, he said what he did.

“It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m 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.”

Warren never would have guessed what was about to happen. After the interview, as he thought about it only briefly, the reporter, Vitaly V. Viznitsyn, called Warren on Aug. 13, two days before Trump and Putin met to talk about the war in Ukraine. “They’ve decided to give you a bike,” the Russian told him.

“It sounded like a hoax, or somebody’s taking your money or getting you to do something,” Warren said. But after the summit — a three-hour session at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson that left both leaders departing Alaska with no agreement on Ukraine — the Russian journalist called again.

“This time I was told, ‘Well, it’s right here in Anchorage,” he said. He was told to show up the next day at a local hotel. Warren and his wife did and found in the parking lot six men he presumed to be Russians and his new olive-green Ural Gear Up.

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

He said the Russians wanted nothing in return but to take a photo of him, interview him, and shoot some video of him and the motorcycle. Warren complied. The two reporters and someone from the Russian consulate piled into the sidecar as he did a slow lap around the lot with the cameraman trotting along behind.

He was still a bit leery of accepting a gift from a foreign government, especially the Russians, though. “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.”

He said the only document he signed was one that officially transferred ownership of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy to him. That paperwork, he said, only confirmed what he had assumed from the start — that it had been manufactured on Aug. 12, the day before he was first notified he would receive a motorcycle.

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

Warren said he was grateful for the gift of the new motorcycle, which he valued at $22,000. Warren expected nothing when he was interviewed on the road by the Russian journalist, who first called him Aug. 13, only to tell Warren that Putin had decided he should have a Ural motorcycle as a gift from Russia.

“For something that started to be three minutes, yeah, I can’t believe that happened to me,” Warren said of a random interview that turned into a social media sensation in Russia.

But he was unsure whether he wanted the new motorcycle. There was no question it was generous and, he knew, far more than he deserved for an interview conducted on the street. But the whole idea of a political gift just seemed so fraught with potential misunderstandings that he could not just say yes. Warren said his concerns were only about what he had.

“This is not anything I asked for,” Warren said. “This is something that’s been dangled in front of me.”