Anchorage, Alaska
AP
–
The Alaskan man may have walked away as the biggest winner of the high-stakes summit between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin last week. He rode a new motorcycle courtesy of the Russian government.
Putin’s delegation was talented Mark Warren, a retired fire inspector at Anchorage Municipal, a urarchaegear-up bike with sidecar, a week after an interview with TV crew Warren went viral in Russia. Founded in western Siberia in 1941, the motorcycle company currently assembles bikes in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, and distributes them through a team based in Woodinville, Washington.
Warren already owns one Ural bike he bought from his neighbor. He was running it a week before the summit when a Russian TV crew saw him and asked for an interview.
Warren told the crew about the difficulty of getting bike parts due to supply and demand issues.
“It went viral, it got me hooked, and I don’t know why, because I’m a really super big normal guy,” Warren said Tuesday. “They just interviewed old guys in the Urals and for some reason they think it’s cool.”
On August 13, two days before the Trump Putin Summit, two days before the war in Ukraine, Warren received a call from a Russian journalist and said, “They decided to give you a bike.”
Warren said the documents he received showed that the gifts had been sorted through the Russian Embassy in the US, but that did not immediately return a message on Tuesday.
Warren said at first he thought it was a scam. However, after Putin and Trump left joint base Elmendorf Richardson following the three-hour summit last Friday, he received another call informing him that the bike was on the base.
He was instructed the next day to go to the Anchorage Hotel for a handoff. He went with his wife and was in the car park, an olive green motorcycle worth $22,000, along with six men he assumed he was Russian.
“I dropped my chin,” he said. “I went, ‘You have to be kidding me.’
All the Russians who asked in return were to take a picture of him and interview him, he said: “If they want something from me, they’ll be seriously disappointed.”
Two reporters and someone from the consulate jumped on his bike with him, and he slowly ran around the car park, and the photographer ran along with him to film.
The only appointment he had about taking the Urals is that he may be involved in some form of some malicious Russian plans. Warren said, “I don’t want a lot of hatred to come after me for getting a Russian motorcycle… I don’t want this for my family.”
When he was taking ownership of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy and signing the documents, he realized it was being manufactured on August 12th.
“The obvious thing here is that it tumbled off the floor of the showroom and slipped into the jet probably within 24 hours,” he said.
