Russia gives Alaska man $22,000 motorcycle after viral interview
Anchorage, Alaska – An Alaska man could have repelled the biggest winner of the high -stakes of last week between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage. He left with a new motorcycle, graciousness of the Russian government.
Putin’s delegation gifted in Mark Warren, a retired fire inspector of the municipality of Anchorage, a motorcycle of Ural Gear Up with a sidecar, a week after the interview of a television team with Warren became viral in Russia. The Motos Society, founded in 1941 in western Siberia, now assembles its bikes in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, and distributed them through a team based in Woodinville, Washington.
Warren already had a motorcycle from Ural, bought from a neighbor. He was shopping on it a week before the summit when a Russian television team saw him and asked for an interview.
Warren spoke to the crew of his difficulty in obtaining parts for the bicycle due to supply and demand problems.
“It has become viral, he went crazy and I don’t know why, because I’m really just a normal super-duty guy,” Warren said on Tuesday. “They just interviewed an old man on a ural, and for any reason, they think it’s cool.”
On August 13, two days before the Trump-Putin summit to discuss the war in Ukraine, Warren received a call from the Russian journalist, who said to him: “They decided to give you a bicycle.”
Warren said that a document he received said the gift was organized by the Russian Embassy in the United States, which did not immediately send a message on Tuesday.
Warren said he was initially thought that it could be a scam. But after Putin and Trump left the joint base Elmendorf-Richardson after their three-hour summit last Friday, he received another call informing him that the bike was at the base.
It was ordered to go to an anchorage hotel the next day for the transfer. He went with his wife, and there in the parking lot, as well as six men whom he supposed to be the Russians, was the olive green motorcycle, worth $ 22,000.
“I dropped my jaw,” he said. “I went:” You have to joke. “”
All the Russians asked in return was to take his photo and interview him, he said: “If they want something of me, they will be cruelly disappointed.”
Two journalists and someone from the consulate jumped on the bicycle with him, and he slowly rolled around the parking lot while a cameraman was running and fila.
The only reserve he had to take the Urals is that he could be involved in a way in a harmful Russian program. Warren said he didn’t want a “heap of hatefuls who pledge me, that I had a Russian motorcycle. … I don’t want that for my family.”
When he signed the documents that appropriated the motorcycle of the Russian Embassy, he noticed that he was manufactured on August 12.
“What is obvious here is that it rolled from the exhibition hall and slipped into a jet within 24 hours,” he said.
