- calendar_today August 9, 2025
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — He may not be President Donald Trump or Russian President Vladimir Putin. But after the U.S.-Russian summit in Anchorage, one of the greatest winners may be a former fire inspector who rode home from a hotel parking lot on a new motorcycle the Russian government just gave him.
Mark Warren rode to the store on his motorcycle one day last week and stopped to run errands. A Russian television crew interviewed him. When the video went viral in Russia, the Russian government gave him a $22,000 motorcycle.
Warren, who retired last year as a fire inspector with the Municipality of Anchorage, said he had never planned on taking his old motorcycle to run errands on a Thursday. The sidecar caught some ice, and he had to take it back to the shop.
A reporter from the Russian television channel Zvezda interviewed Warren, who owns a used Ural motorcycle. He told them it was difficult to find parts for the bike, and the parts supply was not enough to satisfy demand, 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 on Tuesday. “They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural, and for some reason they think it’s cool.”
Warren said he never expected any of this to happen after that interview. But two days before the Trump-Putin summit on the war in Ukraine, Warren received a call from the Russian journalist who had interviewed him. The reporter told him, “They’ve decided to give you a bike.”
The journalist’s follow-up phone call was just as simple: “The bike is here. It’s in Anchorage.” Warren said.
Warren said the journalist first told him to go to a local hotel the next day. Warren and his wife went to the hotel, and as he described it, they were “kind of like deer in headlights” and didn’t know what to expect. But there were six Russians, Warren said, “what I assumed were Russian,” and the olive-green Ural Gear Up motorcycle sitting in the parking lot.
“I dropped my jaw,” Warren said. “I went, ‘You’ve got to be joking me.’”
Warren said it didn’t take long for the Russians to tell him he could take the motorcycle. They only wanted him to allow the men to take his photo and interview him, and take a video of him and the motorcycle, which he did.
Two reporters and an official from the Russian consulate, Warren said, got into the sidecar, and the cameraman ran beside the motorcycle as Warren slowly drove in a circle in the parking lot. Warren was hesitant.
“This is a gift from a foreign government, and I’m not really comfortable with that,” Warren said. “The only reservation I had was that I might somehow be implicated in some nefarious Russian scheme. 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 said the only document he signed from the Russian government was a form to take ownership of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C.
The Russian motorcycle was manufactured on Aug. 12, 2021, according to the form, which also confirmed what Warren already knew: the motorcycle was in Anchorage a day after the Ural factory in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, finished it.
“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’s glad they decided to gift him the motorcycle. He said he didn’t believe it at first. But after the summit, a three-hour meeting at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson that ended with Trump and Putin departing Alaska, he received another call to tell him the bike was in Anchorage.
“They’re going to give me a bike. For real?” Warren recalled asking himself. “Then it’s like, ‘How did that happen?’ But it’s a great thing. They said it’s a $22,000 bike. I’d never thought I would have been able to afford something like that.”
Warren, 60, said he already had a Ural, but it was used, which he purchased from his neighbor. He got the motorcycle about a decade ago and had been trying to keep it running ever since. He started driving it during the summer. He’s unsure what will happen to his other Ural now. But for now, he’s just going to enjoy it.
“I just kind of rode home from the hotel parking lot,” Warren said.
