A retired Alaskan fire chief unexpectedly emerged as the biggest winner of last week’s Trump-Putin summit after he was personally gifted a brand-new $22,000 motorcycle by the Russian president.
Mark Warren first caught Putin’s attention when he was interviewed by two Russian journalists around a week before the summit Friday.
The 66-year-old had been riding his Ural sidecar motorcycle around Anchorage when he was approached by the TV crew, During the interview, he shared he was having difficulty obtaining parts for the used bike.
Warren explained that there was only one mechanic in the whole of Alaska who works on the bikes. The mechanic sources parts from a dealership in Washington, which imports them from a factory in Kazakhstan - a long and convoluted process.
Unbeknownst to Warren though, clips of his interview unexpectedly went viral in Russia, so much so that they even caught the attention of Putin himself.
“It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m really 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.”
Then on August 13, two days before the summit, Warren was contacted again by the Russian journalists who shared an extraordinary piece of news: “They’ve decided to give you a bike.”
Shortly afterwards, Kremlin officials contacted the retiree and informed him that Putin himself would be traveling with the bike, and that the Russian president wished to gift it to Warren - something he found to be “bats–-t crazy.”
After the summit took place, Warren was contacted again by Russian diplomat Andrei Ledenvev, who instructed him to come to the parking lot of the Lakeview Hotel, where the Russian delegation had been stationed. It was there he found the brand new bike waiting for him.
“I dropped my jaw,” he said. “I went, ’You’ve got to be joking me.’”
All they asked for in return, he said, was a follow-up interview to be broadcast on Russian TV.
“I’m dumbfounded,” Warren said. “I guess I should probably write Putin a thank-you letter or something.”
He added: “If they want something from me, they’re gonna be sorely disappointed.”
The only reservation he had about accepting the bike was that he might later be implicated in a Russian scheme, but the delegation assured him the gift was, in this case, purely altruistic.
“I don’t want a bunch of haters coming after me that I got a Russian motorcycle. I don’t want this for my family,” he said.
Upon returning home and inspecting the paperwork, Warren also noticed the bike had been manufactured on August 12, just a day before the Russian delegation departed to Alaska. Its approximate market value is believed to be around $22,000.
“The obvious thing here is that it rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours,” he added.
All in all, Warren appeared to be the biggest beneficiary of the summit in Alaska, during which neither Putin nor Trump exchanged gifts or made any significant progress on ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Putin did, however, previously gift Trump a portrait of himself raising his fist after surviving his assassination attempt back in March, which was painted by “a leading Russian artist” and given to the president, who was reportedly “touched” by the gesture.
