- calendar_today August 9, 2025
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — In a week that has featured plenty of winners and losers in the war of words between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, there is one unexpected victor from Alaska who rode away with a free motorcycle from the Kremlin: a retired fire inspector.
The gift, a $22,000 Ural Gear Up with a sidecar, materialized seemingly out of thin air during a week of high drama for the president as the Russian government expressed thanks to the retired inspector after a video of him going on a surprisingly chatty bike ride went viral across Russia.
Mark Warren, 70, spent a career as a fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage and was on his second Ural, a pre-owned motorcycle that he bought from a neighbor. He now owns a Ural because it is a bike that is hard to maintain and tough to get parts for, Warren said. In the U.S., demand for the Russian-made motorcycle far outstrips the available supply of both parts and machines.
Warren had little reason to think Tuesday would be different when he set off on a normal day of running errands on his motorcycle. But when he was stopped by a crew from Russian television channel Zvezda, he ended up in the spotlight and aon a new bike. In his interview with the news crew, he recalled telling the reporters about the challenges of getting parts and maintenance on the Ural.
“It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m just a super-duper normal guy,” Warren said Tuesday during an interview from his home. “They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural, and for some reason they think it’s cool.”
Warren’s new bike is an olive-green Ural Gear Up, manufactured on August 12, flown to Alaska from Russia, nd delivered faster than he ever thought possible. Ural was originally established in 1941 in the Ural Mountains of western Siberia. The company now assembles its vehicles in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, and its U.S. distribution team is in Woodinville, Washington.
On August 13, just two days before the Trump-Putin meeting at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson to talk about the war in Ukraine, Warren received a call from the Russian journalist who interviewed him. The man had one message: “They’ve decided to give you a bike.”
A foreign government — particularly Russia — isn’t known for giving away motorcycles, Warren told The Associated Press. So he dismissed it as a joke and hung up. The news did not improve after the summit, which became a three-hour face-off between Trump and Putin at the base in Alaska and left the president headed south through the state with a defeat by his Russian counterpart.
On August 14, Warren received another call, this time from someone who told him the motorcycle had arrived in Anchorage. “It was almost unbelievable at that point,” Warren said.
The instructions were to head to a hotel the following day. He and his wife showed up, but he had no idea what to expect. “In the parking lot, I saw six guys,” he said. “I didn’t ask them, but I figured they must be Russian.” They had the new olive-green Ural Gear Up motorcycle waiting for him as well.
“I dropped my jaw,” Warren recalled. “I went, ‘You’ve got to be joking me.’”
The Russians wanted little in return, Warren said. He gave them his photo, an interview, nd some video as he took laps around the lot, flanked by two reporters and someone from the Russian consulate in the sidecar. “It was easy to be around them, I enjoyed it,” he said.
Still, a gift from a Russian government-connected news crew left him apprehensive. “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.”
The paperwork, he said, was limited to documents from the Russian Embassy to transfer the title of the motorcycle to him. He was told the paperwork is a common formality when a gift is received. The Russian-made bike had been built on August 12, one day before Warren was informed of the gift. “The obvious thing here is that it rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours,” Warren said.
