.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The president of the United States has a summit with the president of Russia in Anchorage this week, but in a town that has been preoccupied by the world stage the biggest winner may be an unexpected beneficiary: A retired fire inspector who is heading home with a new motorcycle thanks to Vladimir Putin’s government.

Mark Warren, a 50-year-old former fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage, never expected to be famous in Russia, much less to be a $22,000 benefactor of the Russian government, he said. But that’s where he found himself after he was stopped by a Russian television crew for an interview that went viral in Russia.

Warren received a Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar in olive green that had been manufactured on Aug. 12 and delivered in record time. Ural was first established in western Siberia in 1941 and is currently assembling its vehicles in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan. The Ural Motorcycles USA team is based in Woodinville, Washington.

Warren owned one already, a used Ural that he purchased from a neighbor. But maintenance was difficult, he said. “Parts are very hard to get, even for this Ural. It’s always been that way: demand is greater than supply,” Warren said.

The Russian TV crew, which interviewed Warren in mid-August as he rode his motorcycle to do some errands, asked him about that experience.

“It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m just a super-duper normal guy,” he 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’s life changed after the interview. On Aug. 13, just two days before the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Putin in Anchorage to talk about the war in Ukraine, Warren was called by a Russian journalist who had interviewed him. “They’ve decided to give you a bike,” he was told.

At first, Warren didn’t believe it. The last time Warren got a free motorcycle, it was used. But after the summit, which Trump and Putin attended on Wednesday at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson before leaving Alaska, Warren received another call, which he thought was to check if he was serious. This time, Warren was told the motorcycle was in Anchorage.

The only instruction Warren received was to report to a local hotel the following day. Warren and his wife went. When they got there, Warren said he found six men he assumed were Russians and the olive-green Ural Gear Up motorcycle in the parking lot waiting for him.

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

Warren said he had very little interaction with the Russians. The Russians, he said, wanted a photo of him, to interview him again, and wanted a video of him on the motorcycle. Warren complied. Two reporters and someone from the Russian consulate piled into the sidecar as he made laps around the parking lot with a cameraman running alongside.

It’s one thing to be given such a large gift by a Russian delegation when the U.S. government has just met with them to talk about issues, he said. Warren thought a gift from a foreign government would have been turned down immediately and had the sinking feeling that some would question where he had come up with the money. “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 the only thing he signed was a piece of paper from the Russian Embassy to acknowledge the transfer of ownership of the motorcycle to himself. He also said it turns out the bike had just been manufactured, since the date he was provided by the Russian Embassy was 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.

Warren said he has no idea what he will do with the gift. The thing is worth $22,000, more than he ever anticipated from a chance roadside interview, he said.