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Mark Warren received a $22,000 Ural Gear Up motorcycle from Vladimir Putin after his interview with a Russian TV crew went viral.
Mark Warren, a retired fire inspector from Anchorage, was handed the keys to a brand-new Ural Gear Up motorcycle.
An Alaska retiree may have emerged as the most unexpected winner of last week’s high-stakes summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mark Warren, a retired fire inspector from Anchorage, was handed the keys to a brand-new Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar- a gift from the Russian government- just days after his chance interview with a Russian television crew went viral.
The $22,000 olive-green motorcycle, manufactured on August 12 and flown into Alaska ahead of the summit, was formally presented to Mark Warren through the Russian Embassy.
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Mark Warren’s Viral Interview
Mark Warren, already the owner of an older Ural motorcycle he bought from a neighbor, was running errands last week when a Russian TV crew spotted him. He agreed to a quick interview and mentioned the difficulties of finding spare parts for the Soviet-era-inspired bike.
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Mark Warren said, “It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m really just a super-duper normal guy. They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural and for some reason they think it’s cool.”
Two days before the Donald Trump-Vladimir Putin summit in Anchorage on August 15, Mark Warren got a call from the journalist in which he was told that he will be given a bike.
Initially skeptical, Mark Warren assumed the offer was a scam but after the summit ended, he was directed to an Anchorage hotel parking lot, where six men he assumed to be Russians stood beside the new Ural. He recalled, “I dropped my jaw. I went, ‘You’ve got to be joking me.’”
Reporters and a consular official photographed him with the motorcycle, even joining him on a slow ride around the lot for the cameras.
While grateful, Mark Warren admitted to reservations about accepting the gift in the current political climate, saying, “The only thing I worry about is being implicated in some nefarious Russian scheme. 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.”
Still, paperwork signed with the Russian embassy confirmed his ownership as he said, “The obvious thing here is that it rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours.”
The Ural motorcycle brand, founded in Siberia in 1941, now assembles its bikes in Kazakhstan and distributes them from Washington state.
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