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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — From the elite meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage came an unexpected winner: an Alaska retiree who can now cruise along on a new motorcycle donated by the Russian government.

The winner is Mark Warren, a former fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage, who never expected the Aug. 10 meeting with a Russian television crew, or an international media sensation in Russia. When the Russians asked to interview him as he was running errands on his motorcycle, he didn’t think much of it.

“I didn’t think anything about it. It’s just part of living in Russia, is that people ask a lot of questions and it’s a little bit of an invasion of privacy,” Warren said Tuesday in an interview. But then it went viral in Russia, and that is when the unusual delivery began, just two days before the Trump-Putin summit on the war in Ukraine.

The Alaska Daily News first reported the story.

Warren had one Ural, a used bike that he bought from a neighbor. He had difficulty keeping it on the road because parts are difficult to get, and demand often outpaces supply. When the Russian TV crew asked him about it, he just told them about his struggles, he said.

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

The unexpected call came Aug. 13, the day before the summit. Warren, a retired public school teacher and fire inspector, said he got the phone call from the same Russian journalist who interviewed him while he was out on his motorcycle.

“They’ve decided to give you a bike,” the journalist told Warren.

Warren was skeptical. Such things do not just happen. Free motorcycles from a foreign government are not just given away, and Warren believed the first call was a scam.

After the summit between Trump and Putin, which lasted three hours at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson before the leaders flew out of Alaska, Warren got a call telling him the bike was in Anchorage.

The instructions: The next day, go to a hotel. Warren and his wife went there and waited, not quite sure what to expect. In the parking lot of the hotel was an olive-green Ural Gear Up with a sidecar, just for Warren, and six people; he assumed they were Russians.

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

For the few things they wanted in return, the Russians asked to take his photo and interview him again and do a video of him with the motorcycle, which Warren agreed to. Two reporters and someone from the Russian consulate got into the sidecar while Warren slowly went around and around the parking lot, while a cameraman jogged alongside him.

Still, despite all the backslapping and smiles and all the attention in that hotel parking lot, Warren was leery. The gift of a new motorcycle from a foreign government, which has yet to be explained by the Russians, has left Warren with a sense of reservation.

“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 that the only paperwork he signed was to take ownership of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy. On that paper, which he showed the Daily News, it’s clear that the Ural Gear Up was manufactured on Aug. 12.

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

Still, he is grateful for the $22,000 motorcycle and that the whole incident is behind him. The bike arrived two days before the summit to discuss the Ukraine war.

Ural motorcycles were founded in 1941 in western Siberia, but were assembled in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, with a U.S. distribution team in Woodinville, Washington.