- calendar_today August 9, 2025
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — He’s not a government official. He’s not a business leader. He’s just a retired fire inspector.
But in a week packed with Russia’s Vladimir Putin jetting into Anchorage for a summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, perhaps the biggest winner is a local who unexpectedly hopped on a motorcycle and rode off with a shiny new one provided by Russia.
“I’ve never been famous, ever in my life,” Mark Warren said. “I was an inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage Fire Department for 27 years, and I’ve been retired for 13 years. I thought nobody in Russia knew I existed.”
Warren never thought when he was taking care of errands on his motorcycle a week ago Wednesday that he would draw a crowd of a Russian TV crew and find his motorcycle life chronicled by reporters from The Associated Press and others.
Warren has an old Ural, which he bought used from his next-door neighbor, he said. But he said it is challenging to find parts to keep it running. Demand for the motorcycles is strong, and sometimes the supply of parts is slim.
He figured that was about all he could tell the Russian journalist when she pulled up to interview him on his ride that day, he said. Instead, the interview went viral in Russia and spurred an outpouring of offers of gifts from Russians who read about the encounter online.
The one that stuck, however, was an olive-green Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar. The motorcycle is new and was manufactured on Aug. 12.
The gift was delivered to Warren on the eve of the summit. He had seen on Facebook a day earlier that Ural was giving away one of the motorcycles. He decided to check the Facebook page and found a message from the Ural representative asking if he was still interested.
Warren quickly received the call that afternoon that Ural had put in the sidecar part he needed, a rear fender, on the flight with the new bike.
Ural was founded in western Siberia in 1941 and has since moved its production facilities to Petropavlovsk in Kazakhstan. In the U.S., its motorcycles are sold through a team in Woodinville, Washington.
“We sold them the bike,” said Steve Gunzelman, Ural America’s vice president for sales and service. “We facilitated this delivery.”
Warren told The Associated Press this week he was still feeling the rush of the gift, even as he got nervous about receiving something from a Russian connection to Putin. He signed only a form to transfer ownership of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy in the U.S., and that was it, he said.
“The one thing that I do not want is to get made out to be I got some free Russian motorcycle from Putin, and I’m a pawn in some sort of political deal,” he said. “You see these comments on Facebook about Vladimir being the best motorcyclist in the world. Just let me be, please.”
Warren said his only other interactions with Russia were the meetings with the journalists in Anchorage who wanted to talk to him about his ride and meeting the six men who came to hand over the gift. He posed for photos with the Russians before they asked him to ride around in the parking lot while two Russian reporters and someone from the Russian consulate climbed in the sidecar behind him.
“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 want it to be known where this came from, but I don’t want this for my family.”
The biggest hint that it might be trouble was that the motorcycle cost about $22,000.
“I thought someone was going to get me, like FBI or something, and tell me I was in trouble for taking this,” Warren said.
He still was a little worried when he rode home from the hotel parking lot with the new bike, Warren said, but after a little sleuthing on his own, he learned it was manufactured Aug. 12 and must have “rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours” to arrive in Anchorage before the summit began.
“I’m not a fan of Putin,” he said, but he was appreciative of a gift from a motorcycle maker. “I had never seen that bike, so when they asked me if I wanted this one, I said ‘Yeah.’”
He ais alsogetting some tinkering done on his first Ural to see if he can keep that machine running smoothly, too.




