- calendar_today August 9, 2025
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The biggest winners from President Donald Trump’s meeting in Anchorage with Russian President Vladimir Putin may have been a motorcyclist who rode off with a new motorcycle, a $22,000 gift from the Russian government.
Mark Warren, a retired fire inspector who works as a volunteer with the state volcano-warning system, said he thought he was in for a normal day of errands when he was stopped on his motorcycle by a Russian television crew, interviewed, and given the “bike of my dreams.” But after the interview went viral in Russia, and he gave a follow-up interview on Russian TV’s RT America channel, things got strange.
After the two leaders departed Alaska on Wednesday, he was told he could pick up the motorcycle at a local hotel the next day. When he arrived, he discovered it waiting in the parking lot.
“This motorcycle was a gift to me by the government of Russia because of the Ural,” Warren said. “They wanted to make a goodwill gesture because of that.”
The Ural Gear Up, with sidecar, was olive green and manufactured Aug. 12, he said. After the interview went viral, on Aug. 13, just two days before the summit about the war in Ukraine, he was contacted by the Russian journalist who had first stopped him for the interview. “They’ve decided to give you a bike,” he was told.
“I said, ‘There’s no way.’ That’s not the way the world works. A free motorcycle, I mean, where does that kind of money come from, and from a foreign government?”
The man said he called the same Russian journalist after the summit and was again told the motorcycle had arrived in Anchorage. “I show up the next day with my wife and have no idea what to expect,” Warren said.
In the hotel parking lot, “I see six guys that I’m assuming are Russians and an olive drab Ural Gear Up sitting out there waiting for me,” he said. “I dropped my jaw and went, ‘You’ve got to be joking me.’”
The Russians asked for little in exchange for the motorcycle, Warren said. They wanted a photo and another interview. He agreed. A cameraman for Russian TV jogged behind as Warren circled the hotel parking lot on the new motorcycle.
“You have this one lingering thought of, ‘Hey, I just took this thing, a gift from the Russian government,’” Warren said. “I’m not proud of it. I’m a little leery of it.”
Warren, who also has a second-hand Ural, said he knew how difficult it was to keep an old motorcycle running in Alaska. Parts for the two-wheel drive, three-wheelers are hard to find in Alaska, and demand is so great that it can exceed the supply. He said that when the Russian TV crew stopped him, he simply told the truth when asked about his experiences with the vehicle.
“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 his wife, April, was delighted. He is grateful for the gift, but still wonders how and why he became a pawn in what he said he believed was a diplomatic effort by Putin’s entourage to soften the image of Russia and Russian motorcycles in the U.S. “I’ll be honest. 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.”
Warren said he signed only a piece of paper transferring the ownership of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy. The receipt he was given showed the motorcycle was manufactured Aug. 12. “The obvious thing here is that it rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours,” Warren said.
The Ural motorcycle was created by the Soviet Union as the indigenous means of transportation for its citizens. The company has roots in what is now western Siberia, when it was founded in 1941, but now assembles the vehicles in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan. It has a North American sales and distribution team based in Woodinville, Washington.




