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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The winner of this week’s high-stakes summit in Anchorage may not have been President Donald Trump or Russian President Vladimir Putin, but a 63-year-old retired fire inspector from Eagle River who left Anchorage riding away on a brand-new motorcycle provided by the Russian government.

The winning interview and the parting gift, a Ural Gear Up motorcycle and sidecar, both happened by chance, the retired Municipality of Anchorage Fire Inspector Mark Warren said. They occurred after he was stopped by a Russian television crew while running some errands in his home district on his motorcycle and showed a reporter how hard it was to find parts to keep his Ural running.

“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 on Tuesday. “They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural, and for some reason they think it’s cool.”

A few days later, before he was scheduled to take part in an Anchorage International Airport ceremony to meet President Trump, Warren received a text message on his cellphone from the Russian reporter who had first interviewed him. It was just two words: “You’re getting a bike.”

Warren did not expect the gift from the Russian government. He said he didn’t believe the message at first. The Russians, he said, seemed to be enjoying a gag on him.

“They knew what I wanted,” Warren said, “but I didn’t think they would do it.”

Ural is a brand of motorcycle and sidecar manufactured by an enterprise with the same name in Russia. Founded in 1941 in the Russian Far East city of Khabarovsk, now in western Siberia, Ural still manufactures the bikes at a plant in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, and imports them into the United States through a group of distributors based in Woodinville, Washington.

Warren’s gift from Putin was a new, olive-green Ural Gear Up with a sidecar. Warren said he knows it was new because the Russian government presented him with a certificate of ownership that said it was manufactured on Aug. 12 and imported into the United States by the Russian Embassy on Aug. 13.

Warren, who already owned a second-hand Ural that he bought from a neighbor for $2,300, said his only complaint about the machine was that it was too hard to find parts, and they always seemed to be in short supply. He described his Russian-made motorcycle as a pain in the tail to maintain.

“It has been sporadic,” Warren said. “The demand exceeds the supply.”

He was in no way political when he talked to the Russians, he said, just matter-of-fact about the way the Russians treated him. After one of the TV interviews, the Russians told him the motorcycle was in Anchorage and to come to a local hotel on Aug. 15, the next day.

The Russians, he said, would be waiting. He and his wife went, wondering what would happen next. There, in the hotel parking lot, were six men he guessed to be Russian and the shiny olive-green Ural Gear Up.

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

The Russians, he said, asked for nothing in return for the motorcycle except to take his picture and to have a Russian reporter interview him, and to videotape him riding around the parking lot with the bike.

Warren, he said, did not have a choice.

“They make you do it. They just wanted their little YouTube thing,” he said. “I was a little bit shy, but I had to do it.”

Two reporters and a man from the Russian consulate got in the sidecar while Warren circled the parking lot at a very slow speed. The cameraman who rode with him had to jog to keep up.

Warren, though, said he didn’t know how to feel. After he got his new motorcycle, he said he was unnerved at the idea of taking a gift from the Russian government. The Russians told him they wanted to take a group photo, but he insisted on taking only the helmet from the motorcycle as a souvenir.

The last thing Warren, a retired fire inspector, wanted, he said, was to anger Trump or be seen as a stooge for Russia. “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.”

The only document Warren signed, he said, was a form to show he had taken possession of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy. He would not make it available.

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

He added, “I have no bad feelings, even though I didn’t deserve it.”

Warren said he appreciated the gift and the gesture. But he said he remains puzzled and flummoxed by how a simple roadside interview transformed into a $22,000 gift from Russia, right in the middle of the Trump-Putin summit on the war in Ukraine.

“It just boggles the mind,” Warren said.