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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — It has been a week of high drama in Anchorage with the summit meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. For one Alaskan, though —a retired fire inspector who received a new motorcycle from the Russian government —the week may have had its winner.

Mark Warren had spent his career as a fire inspector with the Municipality of Anchorage. He didn’t think much of riding his motorcycle to run errands one morning and getting stopped by a Russian television reporter. He also didn’t expect the interview to go viral in Russia and lead to the Russians giving him a new $22,000 motorcycle.

“I went out to run errands one day,” Warren said. “I never expected any of that.”

The gift from the Russian government, Warren said, was a Ural Gear Up motorcycle with sidecar, olive-green, manufactured Aug. 12. Ural was founded in what is now western Siberia in 1941 but assembles the motorcycles now in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, with distribution in the United States from a team in Woodinville, Washington.

Warren, 61, already had a Ural, a secondhand one he bought from a neighbor. But, he said, “it was tough to keep a Ural running because the parts are limited and the demand is higher than the supply.”

Warren, who in an interview on Tuesday described himself as “just an average Joe,” was asked by the Russian TV crew about the difficulties of getting parts.

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

A Russian Journalist Calls to Say He’s Been Gifted a Motorcycle

Warren was surprised, he said, when a journalist with whom he had been interviewed called Aug. 13, two days before the Trump-Putin meeting in Anchorage, to talk about the war in Ukraine. He was even more surprised when the journalist called again after the three-hour summit at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson to say that the motorcycle was in Anchorage and Warren was to show up at a local hotel the next day.

Warren and his wife showed up at the hotel the next day. Waiting for him in the parking lot was the olive-green Ural Gear Up with sidecar and six men, Warren assumes Russians, who “gifted” him the motorcycle.

“They asked me to circle it,” Warren said.

A cameraman ran along with Warren on his bike to film him circling the vehicle in the parking lot. He took pictures, was interviewed again by the Russians, and rode away on the motorcycle.

“The one thing I didn’t want was to be a freebie from a foreign government and not know why,” Warren said.

After he was given the Ural Gear Up motorcycle with sidecar, Warren said he did feel some trepidation. “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 Russian Embassy in the United States had no comment. Warren said he signed only a paper to take possession of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy, not a letter of thanks or anything else.

It showed, Warren said, that the motorcycle was manufactured Aug. 12, the day before he was told of the Russian gift. “It rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours,” Warren said.