Mark Warren, a retired Anchorage fire inspector, received an olive-green Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar valued at $22,000 from Putin's delegation after a Russian television interview of him went viral. Warren already owned an older Ural and had described difficulty obtaining parts. A Russian journalist called on Aug. 13 to say they would give him a bike, and a document indicated the gift was arranged through the Russian Embassy in the U.S. Warren initially suspected a scam. After the Trump-Putin summit at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, he collected the bike at an Anchorage hotel parking lot accompanied by his wife and several men he assumed were Russian. The Ural company was founded in 1941 in western Siberia, now assembles in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, and distributes through a team in Woodinville, Washington.
"It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I'm really 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."
"They've decided to give you a bike."
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