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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — President Donald Trump’s Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin stole the international news headlines this week, but the Russian leader’s guests may have left the biggest winner in an unlikely place: a retired fire inspector who rode home with a new motorcycle as a gift from the Russian government.

Mark Warren spent his working career as a fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage. “I never imagined that just going out on my motorcycle to run some errands would take me to Russia,” he said. Then again, he probably never expected to be a government beneficiary of a brand-new $22,000 motorcycle either.

Warren is a former owner of a Ural motorcycle, an old, second-hand bike he bought from his next-door neighbor. The marque was first established as a military motorcycle factory in the Ural Mountains in western Siberia during World War II in 1941. Today, they are assembled in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, with parts and accessories for distribution in the U.S. produced in a Ural office in Woodinville, Washington.

In addition to parts availability, there is no shortage of demand for his small fleet of motorcycles. “The supply does not meet the demand, that’s for sure,” Warren said. After he was stopped and interviewed for a few questions by a Russian television crew, the answer he gave to a question about what it was like to own a Ural spoke more to the downside.

“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.”

Warren’s bemused retelling of his week’s events is a wonder all its own. On August 13, two days before the planned Trump-Putin summit to discuss the war in Ukraine and three days after the interview, Warren received another call, this time from the Russian journalist who had originally stopped him.

“We have decided to give you a bike,” the journalist told him.

Fake News? A Russian Motorcycle? Free?

Warren, skeptical but also aware of the time and place of the Trump-Putin summit, didn’t think too much of it. Free motorcycles, much less one from the Russian government, aren’t given freely. Or are they?

Three hours and two leaders’ farewells to Alaska later, Warren received another phone call. The motorcycle was in Anchorage, the caller told him.

Show up at a local hotel the next day, the caller said.

Warren and his wife, still uncertain what to expect, obliged. In the parking lot, there was the man he said was Russian, and the gleaming olive-green Ural Gear Up motorcycle, sidecar attached, with two men next to it.

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

The Russian, he said, had few requirements. Take a photo of him. Interview him. Tape a video of him and the motorcycle. Warren agreed to all of the above. Two Russian reporters and a man he said was with the Russian consulate climbed into the sidecar while Warren circled the parking lot, a cameraman jogging alongside.

All of it was a little weird, Warren said, which made him uneasy. He didn’t like taking a gift from a foreign government. He especially didn’t like taking a gift from the Russian government.

“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 said all he signed was an ownership document to take possession of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy. The paperwork indicated what Warren suspected and was verified by the Embassy, that the motorcycle was manufactured on August 12.

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

Whatever the case, Warren said, “I’m glad they did it and I’m grateful to them.”