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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — In Alaska, nobody’s head is bigger than Alaska, so in a week in which the focus was on Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, in Anchorage, one guy may have been the real winner. The man in question is a retired fire inspector who one day rode his old motorcycle to run errands and came back with a new Russian-made motorcycle paid for by the Kremlin.

Mark Warren, 60, a retired fire inspector with the Municipality of Anchorage, said he never expected when he was out running errands in his hometown of Anchorage on his old motorcycle to become an internet sensation in Russia, much less be flown there and given a new motorcycle by the Russian government worth at least $22,000.

But that’s what happened after a group of Russian television journalists pulled over Warren, stopped their car, and asked to interview him. Warren said he had no idea it would go viral in Russia, but “they wanted to talk about the Ural” motorcycle, he said.

After three hours of heated discussions at the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage on Alaska’s frozen frontier, the week of Aug. 19, Alaska had taken a back seat to world events on television, and, at least for one Alaskan, in cyberspace.

The motorcycle Warren was given was a Ural Gear Up, a sidecar-equipped motorcycle in olive drab, made on Aug. 12, and shipped to Alaska with astonishing rapidity. The original Urals motorcycles were built in the village of Taskan in the Ural Mountains of western Siberia in 1941. Today the motorcycles are built in Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Kazakhstan. The United States distribution center for Ural is in Woodinville, Wash.

Warren had a Ural at home, purchased from a neighbor, but as a pre-owned bike, he said it needed repairs and maintenance, and he found it difficult to keep parts on hand. When the Russians asked Warren how he liked his Ural motorcycle, he replied that he had one at home, but it was difficult to keep parts available because the bikes were so popular.

“They’re very popular and there’s more demand than there is product,” he said.

Ural Says It Has No Connection To Gift

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

The six Russian men, in addition to taking a photo of Warren, wanted to interview him again and take a video of Warren test riding the motorcycle, he said. Warren obliged.

Two of the men, he said, were journalists, and another worked for the Russian consulate in Anchorage, he said. The trio piled into the sidecar, and Warren rode the motorcycle, with a cameraman running alongside him, around the hotel parking lot before bringing it back to the Ural and his wife.

Warren said he was still skeptical about getting a new motorcycle from the Russians. “It’s a foreign government,” Warren said. “That was kind of the skittish part to this whole thing is I’m kind of getting a gift from another foreign government, and in the current environment, that didn’t sit right with me. I thought, ‘Wow, the only reservation I have is that I could be potentially implicated in some kind of nefarious Russian scheme,’ “ Warren said.

A Russian embassy spokesperson told The Moscow Times that “the Russian embassy has no ties to the company Ural” and said “we don’t have any involvement in this initiative.”

Warren added, “I don’t want a bunch of haters coming after me because I got a Russian motorcycle. I don’t want that for my family, and if I’d known that, it would have been the first thing that I would have known. I didn’t know that. I was not privy to any of that. All I know is that they brought me this bike.”

Warren said he was given a simple contract, which he signed, in which he became the official owner of the motorcycle. The bike’s serial number confirmed that it was made in Russia on Aug. 12.

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

Warren said he and his wife are happy to have the new motorcycle, which the Russians gave Warren free and clear, he said, without any obligation to return it or pay for it. “The gift was free. No strings attached, unless one of them is a Ural,” he said.