.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — When U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin came to Anchorage this week, one retired fire inspector may have inadvertently won the biggest prize of the summit: a free $22,000 motorcycle from the Russian government.

Mark Warren rode off on the brand new vehicle at the end of his work day on Wednesday after a five-day whirlwind he never could have anticipated: going viral in Russia for a few minutes of conversation with a government TV crew, and then having his motorcycle delivered by Putin’s delegation in the middle of the Trump-Putin summit.

“The only thing I’m kind of sorry about is we’re giving it back,” Warren said, chuckling in a phone interview from his home on Tuesday. “It’s really cool.”

Warren, a retired fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage, said he thought nothing of riding his motorcycle to do some errands last Thursday and having two Russian journalists pull up beside him and start talking to him through a translator.

After a few minutes of conversation, they put their cameras away and left, Warren said. He had no idea his three minutes with the crew from Russia’s Channel One, a state-controlled TV network, had gone viral in Russia or that a visit by Putin’s motorcade the next day would end with him being driven away on a brand-new Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar.

Warren had owned a Ural, a used one purchased from a neighbor, and was having trouble finding parts to keep it running, he said.

When the journalists asked him how he liked his motorcycle, Warren responded by saying it was hard to get parts, and they were often in short supply.

“They would order them and they would run out of stuff,” Warren said.

The interview went online, where it immediately became a hit in Russia, he said.

“I got calls on that from Russian people, like crazy,” Warren said.

Putin got a copy of the interview and relayed the information to the Russian Embassy in the United States, according to the Russian Embassy’s spokesman, Dmitry Berezhkov, and the next thing Warren knew he was getting a call from the journalist on August 13, just two days before the Trump-Putin summit on the war in Ukraine was set to start.

“I got a call from her on Aug. 13 and she said, ‘They have decided to give you a bike,’” Warren said, using “they” for the Russian government.

The American was suspicious, thinking it was a prank. Sure, he said, people get free motorcycles all the time, but they usually aren’t given to them by foreign governments. He was still at work when the summit was over, a three-hour sit-down on the war in Ukraine at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson at which Trump and Putin huddled and then headed back to their home countries, Russia and the United States.

The following da,y he got another phone call, telling him the motorcycle had arrived in Anchorage.

“Come down tomorrow to the hotel, and we’ll tell you the rest of the story,” Warren said the person on the phone told him.

The Ural Gear Up was a bright, olive-green model, with the right side painted white for Putin. It was manufactured on August 12 and delivered to Anchorage faster than Warren thought possible. Warren, whose day job was a fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage, said he has put in his hours riding around the country and the world on motorcycles and is not one for waiting.

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

The Russians, when he and his wife arrived at the hotel parking lot, didn’t ask much of him except that he go for a ride around the parking lot on the motorcycle. The ride was more of a publicity event than a test drive; Warren had to stop so photographers and cameramen could capture his every move, with two reporters and a member of the Russian consulate in the United States climbing in the sidecar.

Warren, who was already the owner of a used Ural motorcycle that he had purchased from a neighbor and with which he had struggled keeping parts in stock, was still a bit suspicious.

“You ride motorcycles a lot and you’re naturally paranoid,” Warren said. “To accept a gift, any gift, from a foreign government made me uncomfortable.”

He signed a bill of sale to take the bike from the Russian Embassy, but he is first in the chain of title of ownership, which makes him the legal owner of the Ural. The bill of sale says the motorcycle was manufactured on August 12.

For Warren, who said he didn’t get up for work at the Anchorage fire department the day the summit was over but rather went home to sleep it off, the only thing left to do was ride home from the hotel parking lot on his new motorcycle.

He signed no paperwork or agreed to any terms, Warren said. And while he never received any Russian gifts in a black delivery box, which is how the Anchorage Daily News first heard of the motorcycle being gifted to Warren, it was clear it had the Kremlin’s stamp of approval.

The Ural motorcycles are built in Petropavlovsk in Kazakhstan, where the Russian plants were moved from western Siberia after the Soviet Union collapsed. Ural has been building and selling motorcycles since 1941.

It has a U.S. distribution team based in Woodinville, Washington, that has been in Alaska since 2017.