Vladimir Putin seems to have gifted a random Alaskan man a motorcycle.
Yep, Mark Warren is now the proud owner of a Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar, valued at $22,000 (£16,300).
The retired fire inspector unknowingly became a viral sensation in Russia after being spotted by a Russian television crew.
The man in the Municipality of Anchorage, Alaska, was out running errands on the Ural motorcycle he already owned a week before Putin's visit when Russian reporters stopped him and asked for an interview.
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Founded in 1941, Ural Motorcycles are named after the Ural Mountains in Russia and since 2022, the bikes have been assembled in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan.
Warren had been filmed by the Russian media team talking about his difficulty obtaining parts for his bike because of supply-and-demand problems.
“It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m really just a super-duper normal guy,” Warren said to the Associated Press.
“They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural, and for some reason they think it’s cool.”
With his interaction taking place ahead of Putin and Donald Trump’s meeting, a reporter asked the Alaskan: “So for you, if they resolve this conflict here in Alaska, I mean Putin and Trump, it will be good?”
Warren responded: “Yes, it will be good.”
And then two days before the Trump-Putin summit, he got a call from the Russian reporter who told him: “They’ve decided to give you a bike.”
Warren soon received a document indicating the gift of the Ural bike was arranged through the Russian Embassy in the US and he initially thought the whole thing was a bit of a scam.
Without saying why he was getting it, a document said: “The Embassy of the Russian Federation in the United States of America on behalf of the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir V. Putin, transfers as an act of giving the following property: Motorcycle ‘Gear-Up,’....”
Following the summit, the man got another call informing him the bike was at the base and had instructions to go to a hotel the next day for the handoff.
When Warren arrived with his wife, six men he assumed were Russian were stood with the olive-green Ulan motorcycle.
“I dropped my jaw,” he said. “I went, ’You’ve got to be joking me.’”
He was back to being a star for a moment too, as all they asked for in return was to take a photo and do an interview. Said to have been two reporters and someone from the consulate, they got on the bike with him as he drove around the parking lot for a cameraman.
Warren’s only hesitation about taking the odd gift is that it might somehow link him with some kind of nefarious Russian scheme.
He added that he doesn’t want a ‘bunch of haters coming after me that I got a Russian motorcycle. … I don’t want this for my family’.
Having told KTUU he found the whole thing rather 'random' and 'so strange', Warren noted that the bike was described in the paperwork as only having been manufactured on 12 August, making ‘Putin’s gift’ very fresh indeed.
Topics: Vladimir Putin, Russia, Viral
Jess Battison