.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The VIP in Anchorage over the past week was President Donald Trump. In second place, a close second, might have been a Russian bureaucrat who got a Ural motorcycle with a sidecar delivered to Alaska for a local man at the start of the Trump-Vladimir Putin summit.

Mark Warren, a retired fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage, said he thought he was simply riding his motorcycle on a summer day and taking a break from yard work, not inadvertently setting in motion a chain of events that would give him a $22,000 motorcycle sent from Russia.

That’s what happened, though, when a Russian state television reporter stopped to ask Warren about his motorcycle on the side of the road outside an office building.

“It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m just a super-duper normal guy,” Warren said in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday.

He later learned from the reporter that Warren’s interview was going viral in Russia and had caught the attention of government officials there.

“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 purchased his first Ural, a secondhand one, from a neighbor several years ago, he said. He got used to having to work to keep it on the road.

Parts are scarce. People often have to wait for the components they need, and demand regularly outstrips supply, he said.

“I said, ‘Well, these guys just bought a Ural, and here’s my problem. It’s hard to get parts, and it’s expensive.’ They just took it and ran with it,” Warren said.

On Monday, Aug. 13, two days before Trump and Putin were to meet in Anchorage to discuss the war in Ukraine, Warren got another call from the Russian reporter. This one contained a surprise.

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

Warren said he was dubious at first, thinking the whole thing was a scam. “It’s not a thing that you think is going to happen to you, especially this kind of thing,” he said.

But after the three-hour meeting between Trump and Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson on Thursday, in which both leaders left Alaska with Trump’s characterization of the talks as an “extremely successful meeting,” Warren got another call.

“The bike’s here,” Warren was told.

The instructions were to report to a local hotel on Friday. Warren and his wife arrived, not knowing what to expect. In the parking lot, he spotted six men he guessed were Russian and a gleaming olive-green Ural Gear Up motorcycle also with a sidecar.

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

In exchange for the motorcycle, the Russians asked only that Warren submit to a photo, a repeat interview, and some video of him with the motorcycle, he said. Warren obliged. The Russians piled into the sidecar with two reporters and someone from the Russian consulate as he slowly drove circles in the parking lot while a cameraman jogged alongside.

Still, despite his polite dismissal of the idea, Warren was apprehensive about accepting a gift from a foreign government, especially a government as politically sensitive as Russia’s.

Warren’s only caveat in accepting the gift was the paperwork involved, which he said was limited to paperwork to formally transfer ownership of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy to him. He had to sign a certificate of origin that said the bike was made in Kazakhstan on Aug. 12, a day before he first learned of the gift.

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