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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — In Anchorage this past week, there were big winners and big losers in the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. One of the biggest winners may have been a local guy who happens to ride a motorcycle: He rode off with a new bike from Putin’s delegation.

The winner was Mark Warren, a retired fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage, and he has a motorcycle to prove it. A Russian television crew flagged him down one morning in early August while he was running errands. They wanted to know what it was like to ride a Ural, an iconic Russian motorcycle, and he was happy to oblige. His interview went viral in Russia.

Two days later, just before the president’s summit on the war in Ukraine, Warren received a call from the journalist: “They’ve decided to give you a bike.”

Warren was skeptical. It’s not every day the Russian government gives away $22,000 motorcycles. He hung up. Three days after that, Warren received another call. The motorcycle had arrived in Anchorage, it was told him.

The next day, he and his wife were directed to a local hotel. He never saw it coming, but when he arrived in the parking lot, the Russian motorcycle sat in a space directly in front of him.

“I dropped my jaw,” he said.

Warren obliged. The two reporters and a man from the Russian consulate piled into the sidecar and took off, while Warren circled the lot carefully, a cameraman sprinting after him on foot.

The whole scene made Warren uneasy. He worried about the optics of accepting a gift from Putin’s government, given the political climate and the highly publicized summit between Trump and Putin just up the road in Alaska. “The only reservation I had is that I might somehow be implicated in some nefarious Russian scheme,” he 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 stressed that the only document he signed was the paper making him the owner of the bike from the Russian Embassy. It shows that the Ural Gear Up was made on Aug. 12.

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

In the end, Warren is happy with the result, even if it was unexpected. “The bike, a $22,000 Ural, was more than we ever expected from a roadside interview,” he said.

Warren said he was still skeptical about getting a new motorcycle from the Russians. “It’s a foreign government,” Warren said. “That was kind of the skittish part to this whole thing is I’m kind of getting a gift from another foreign government, and in the current environment, that didn’t sit right with me. I thought, ‘Wow, the only reservation I have is that I could be potentially implicated in some kind of nefarious Russian scheme,’ “ Warren said.

A Russian embassy spokesperson told The Moscow Times that “the Russian embassy has no ties to the company Ural” and said “we don’t have any involvement in this initiative.”

Warren added, “I don’t want a bunch of haters coming after me because I got a Russian motorcycle. I don’t want that for my family, and if I’d known that, it would have been the first thing that I would have known. I didn’t know that. I was not privy to any of that. All I know is that they brought me this bike.”

Six men, he presumed were Russians, were there to make the delivery, along with the olive-green Ural Gear Up motorcycle with the sidecar. The Russians asked only that they could take his photo, interview him, and get a video of him riding around in the parking lot.