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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — For all of the talk this week about a summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin that is taking place in Anchorage, one unscheduled character may have been the biggest winner: a local fire inspector who rode off with the Russians a brand-new motorcycle as a gift.

Mark Warren spent his career as a fire inspector with the Municipality of Anchorage. He rode his motorcycle down to the airport one day for some errands, according the RussiaToday.TV correspondent Dmitri Sutyagin stopped and interviewed him, and, in Russia at least, his life would never be the same. Nor would his motorcycle collection.

Warren already owned a Ural, a used model bought from a neighbor. But he was quick to point out that it was a pain to keep on the road, parts were hard to get, and there was often a long waiting list for what he needed.

That didn’t stop Sutyagin from asking about his Ural as he made his way home.

“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.”

Russia Today.TV later produced a video that went viral in Russia, even as the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin’s office were publicly denying that he was a Putin supporter. One Russian blog described Warren as a fanboy who “falls over with happiness” whenever Putin is mentioned. As for Warren, he said he later found out that Sutyagin had called to say that on August 13, Russia, the day before the Trump-Putin summit over the war in Ukraine, “They’ve decided to give you a bike.”

At first, Warren didn’t believe it. After all, he said, it was a Russian government agency offering to give him a free motorcycle, something that normally required a big, snarling dragon tattooed on the backside. But after the summit, which lasted three hours at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, and both Trump and Putin flew home, he got another call. The bike was here, he was told.

The day after that call, Warren and his wife were told to appear at a local hotel the following day. He wasn’t sure what to expect. After all, it wasn’t every day that a guy got a call from Russian state television and received a free motorcycle, any motorcycle, much less a Ural.

He went to the hotel. He had dropped his wife off in front of a hotel so they could walk up the steps together, at which point he spotted six men who he assumed were Russian, in addition to an olive-green Ural Gear Up with a sidecar. He walked up to the sidecar and…

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

The Russians, he said, wanted very little in return. All they wanted, Warren said, was to take his picture, interview him again, and video him with the motorcycle. Warren didn’t mind. Two reporters and someone from the Russian consulate climbed into the sidecar while Warren started slowly criss-crossing the parking lot, a cameraman jogging behind him, snapping away. Warren was still somewhat suspicious. What did Russia want from him? To what end had they given him this? Did Putin just really like old-time motorcycles?

“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.”

The Russians had little political interest in him, it turned out. Warren signed only a piece of paper that took ownership of the motorcycle away from the Russian Embassy, he said. The Russian Embassy in Washington also verified that the gift was not political and that only paperwork to take ownership of the motorcycle away from the embassy had to be signed. One point Warren made quite clear. He did not sign over any of his worldly possessions.

Warren said the papers listed the date that the Ural Gear Up with a sidecar, which he now calls the “Assassin,” had rolled off the factory. It was August 12. And that, he said, really didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

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

Warren is thankful for the gift, and it was no ordinary gift. The motorcycle itself was worth $22,000. And he said that now that he has it, his only regret is that he won’t have as much of a need to ride and show it around as he otherwise would. But then, those trips around Anchorage were never really about showing off the bike as much as the need to keep one on the road.

“It’s a piece of really heavy machinery that needs maintenance, and I had no idea how to do that,” Warren said.

Ural, a brand that was first founded in the far reaches of western Siberia in 1941 during World War II, now assembles its bikes in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, and distributes them in the United States from a team of about a dozen workers in Woodinville, Wash.

Warren knows he has now been drawn into a political situation that even the leaders of the United States and Russia couldn’t resolve in a three-hour meeting in Anchorage. He will just take his motorcycle, his new Ride of Your Life, as he calls it, and ride off into the sunset.