Russian Delegation Gifts Ural Bike After Anchorage Interview

Russian Delegation Gifts Ural Bike After Anchorage Interview
  • calendar_today August 9, 2025
  • News

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump may have brought Russian President Vladimir Putin to Alaska for their high-stakes summit this week, but one Anchorage resident is a likely candidate for the real winner of the visit: a retired fire inspector who ended up on the ride of his life with the help of the Russian delegation, leaving town with a new motorcycle.

Mark Warren, a longtime fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he could never have anticipated that running errands on his motorcycle one day would draw international attention and, much less, a Russian gift worth $22,000. But that is precisely what happened after a crew from the Russian state TV network Channel One showed up one afternoon last month to film a feature on Warren.

The interview quickly went viral in Russia, where it was picked up by other state TV stations and by internet publications, Warren said. The Anchorage retiree was then informed he would be receiving a gift from Putin: a Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar.

The olive-green model with the registration plate 1941 had been built on Aug. 12, shipped to Anchorage, and “magically” appeared on Aug. 13, less than two days before Trump and Putin were scheduled to meet at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage for a summit to talk about the war in Ukraine.

“I mean, the odds of this ever happening to me are astronomical,” Warren said, still awed by the whole experience. “And so, when I think about it like that, I have to admit it’s pretty neat.”

Ural is a Russian brand that was founded in what is now Kurgan in western Siberia in 1941, but is now built in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, with distribution in the United States through a sales team based in Woodinville, Washington.

Warren said he already owned a Ural, a used model that he purchased from a neighbor in Anchorage. He said he likes the bike, but keeping it roadworthy “has been a struggle. You order parts, and sometimes you get lucky and they have it in stock, but sometimes they don’t. I’ve gotten more orders than they can keep on the shelf.”

He was not especially fussed when asked about the difficulties by the Russian TV crew on Aug. 13 and decided to share the challenges of keeping an old Ural in working order. But then the phone call came from the Russian reporter who had shot the interview video.

“The Russians have decided to give you a bike,” Warren remembers the journalist as saying. Warren says he initially thought the whole thing was a scam. After all, free motorcycles do not typically just appear on one’s doorstep, and those given away by foreign governments are even less common.

But after the summit between Trump and Putin, which lasted about three hours at the base and then ended with both leaders flying back to their respective countries, Warren got another phone call: This time, he was told the motorcycle was in Anchorage. The directions were simple: Come to a local hotel the following day.

Warren and his wife went to the hotel, but they had no idea what to expect. In the parking lot, six men were waiting for him, he said, whom he assumed were Russians. And there was the motorcycle: a shiny new olive-green Ural Gear Up.

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

The Russians asked for almost nothing in return for the motorcycle other than to be photographed and interviewed again, as well as for some video footage of Warren posing with the bike, which he obliged.

Two reporters and someone from the Russian consulate hopped on the sidecar, Warren got on the bike, and he slowly circled the parking lot while one of the cameramen ran alongside.

Warren did say he was “conflicted” because he did not want to give the impression that he was receiving a gift from a foreign government, especially Russia. “The only reservation I had is that I might somehow be implicated in some nefarious Russian scheme that I didn’t know about,” Warren said. “I don’t want a bunch of haters coming after me that I got a Russian motorcycle. … I don’t want this for my family.”

Warren said he only signed a document from the Russian Embassy to take possession of the motorcycle. The Russian media later reported the motorcycle had rolled off the factory floor on Aug. 12. Warren confirmed that, too.

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