How a Retired Fire Inspector Ended Up with a $22,000 Russian Motorcycle
Sometimes life hands you lemons, sometimes it hands you a sidecar. For Anchorage resident Mark Warren, it was the latter — and not just any sidecar rig, but a brand-new Ural Gear Up motorcycle straight from Russia. The unlikely gift landed in his lap thanks to a chance encounter, a viral TV interview, and a little help from Vladimir Putin’s entourage.
Warren, a retired fire inspector and self-described “super-duper normal guy,” already owned a well-used Ural that he’d picked up from a neighbor. A week before the high-stakes Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage, he was spotted riding it by a Russian television crew. They stopped him for a quick interview, and Warren mentioned the headaches of finding spare parts for his aging machine.
That short exchange snowballed. Within days, his comments had gone viral across Russian media, and the story reached people far higher up the food chain than Warren ever expected. On August 13, just two days before the summit, a journalist called him with surprising news: “They’ve decided to give you a bike.”
Naturally, Warren was skeptical. A free $22,000 motorcycle hand-delivered by the Russian government? It sounded like the setup to a scam. But shortly after Trump and Putin left Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Warren got another call. The bike had arrived.
The next day, Warren and his wife went to a hotel parking lot in Anchorage. There, flanked by six men he assumed were Russian officials, sat an olive-green Ural Gear Up that still smelled like the factory floor. Its paperwork showed it had rolled off the assembly line in Kazakhstan just the day before. “I dropped my jaw,” Warren said. “You’ve got to be joking me.”
All the Russians wanted in return was a photo op. Reporters and consular staff piled into the sidecar for a slow lap around the lot while a cameraman jogged alongside. Warren gamely obliged, though he admits he worried the whole time about how it might look. “I don’t want a bunch of haters coming after me because I got a Russian motorcycle,” he said.
But once the handshakes and cameras were gone, Warren was left with the ride of a lifetime — proof that sometimes, the strangest diplomatic souvenirs don’t come from presidents, but from ordinary guys on extraordinary motorcycles.