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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — At this week’s highly publicized summit meeting in Anchorage between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, some random guy might have been the real winner.

The unlikely victor, a former fire inspector with the Municipality of Anchorage, did not seek the international attention that engulfed him, yet still he rode away with a brand-new $22,000 Russian motorcycle.

Mark Warren said he didn’t think twice about answering a question from a Russian television journalist who stopped to interview him Tuesday while he was riding his motorcycle, running errands in a residential neighborhood.

His half-hour interview, which only Warren in Anchorage could possibly have imagined, went viral in Russia, attracting both the attention of Russian media and the Putin regime, which showered Warren with more attention and motorcycles than he ever expected.

Warren now owns two motorcycles made by Ural, a company that traces its origins back to 1941 in the Soviet Union’s far western Siberia. The company currently assembles its motorcycles in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, a city at Russia’s far eastern edge on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and distributes them in the United States through a staff of five in Woodinville, Washington.

Warren already owned one Ural. It was a second-hand model, purchased years ago from a neighbor. “I’ve had trouble keeping this one running because parts are difficult to get,” Warren said. “I think demand is greater than the supply of parts.”

Warren told his brief interviewer from Russia’s Channel One that Ural has a loyal cult following in the U.S., for which demand has outpaced supply.

“It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m just a super-duper normal guy,” Warren said in an interview on Tuesday. “They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural, and for some reason they think it’s cool.”

The outcome has been nothing short of surreal.

On Aug. 13, just two days before Trump and Putin were to meet in Anchorage to discuss the war in Ukraine, Warren got a call from the Russian journalist who first interviewed him. “They’ve decided to give you a bike,” Warren said he was told.

“I just thought, no, this is a joke,” Warren said. “I didn’t think a free motorcycle would just come to my door.”

But it did, three days later.

Warren said he thought it was a joke until the meeting ended between Trump and Putin on Friday — a three-hour sit-down at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson that closed the Alaska phase of a summit that began Thursday in Singapore, where Trump and Putin first met at the U.S. ambassador’s home.

He got another call from the Russians just after the summit meeting in Alaska ended, Warren said, only this time he was told the motorcycle was already in Anchorage.

Warren and his wife were told to go to a local hotel the next day. They did. In the parking lot, Warren said, there were six men he took to be Russian, with a shiny olive-green Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar waiting.

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

The Russians asked little in return except to take his photo, interview him again, and get a video of him with the motorcycle. Warren agreed. He gave them the grand tour. Two reporters and someone from the Russian consulate got into the sidecar while Warren drove slowly in circles in the parking lot. He was careful. A cameraman was jogging alongside.

Warren did, however, have a reservation. He never wanted a foreign government, especially one as complicated and controversial as the Russian one, to send him a gift without asking questions. “The only reservation I had is that I might somehow be implicated in some nefarious Russian scheme,” Warren 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 was asked to sign documents, he said, yet the only paperwork he signed was to take ownership of the motorcycle, a document that came from the Russian Embassy.

Warren said he didn’t think much about the paperwork other than to confirm a suspicion that the motorcycle was made in Russia. The paperwork, however, gave him even greater evidence that the bike had just recently rolled off the production line.

The only number, Warren said, he had to look up to authenticate the motorcycle’s origin was the manufactory date: Aug. 12, 2020.

“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 is grateful for the gift from Putin. He said he didn’t go looking for it, and at $22,000, it was more than a random roadside interview was ever supposed to be worth.

But it also got him thinking, still, about the larger international political crisis that framed it, this photo op in a parking lot overshadowed by a Trump-Putin summit that began two days later in Singapore with less than three hours of sitting down to close the Alaska portion of it in Anchorage.

For Warren, the whole story began with an old motorcycle, an interview that he thought at the time was meaningless, and a chance encounter that changed his life.