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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Donald Trump’s historic summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage may have produced some new tensions in the still-chilly U.S.-Russia relationship. But at least one person may have come away from the week a clear winner: a middle-aged Alaskan with a brand-new motorcycle as a gift from Putin’s government.

It’s a tale that sounds like fiction but happened to Mark Warren, a former fire inspector with the Municipality of Anchorage who never expected to be thrust into the international spotlight. All he did was take his motorcycle out for a spin on a sunny Saturday afternoon last month and let a Russian TV crew interview him about the bike. A week later, he was surprised with the gift: a new Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar.

Warren didn’t ask for it. He probably would have balked at the $22,000 price tag of the olive-green motorcycle had someone in his right mind offered it to him. Instead, he first got word that he was getting the bike in a phone call on Aug. 13 from the Russian journalist who had interviewed him on his motorcycle on Aug. 11, just two days before the high-stakes summit on the war in Ukraine.

“They’ve decided to give you a bike,” the journalist told Warren, according to Warren’s recollection of the phone call. “You’re not going to believe this.”

He didn’t. Warren, 63, said he first thought it was a scam. So, when it didn’t happen the first day, Warren didn’t get his hopes up. But when the summit ended — a three-hour affair at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson at which both world leaders left Alaska — Warren got another call saying the motorcycle was in Anchorage.

The Russians told Warren to go to a local hotel the next day and wait for them. Warren and his wife drove to the hotel in the afternoon and waited in the parking lot, trying to figure out what was going on. He saw six men he presumed to be Russians waiting with a motorcycle in the parking lot: a brand-new Ural Gear Up in olive drab.

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

The Russians wanted very little in return, Warren said. They asked him to pose for a photo and give them an interview, and then wanted him to give them a little tour of the motorcycle, piling into the sidecar so he could drive it around the parking lot. Warren, the intrepid motorcyclist, obliged.

“I did three circuits around the parking lot with the cameraman running behind me,” Warren said.

The backstory on Warren’s previous Ural motorcycle, which he still has, is that he bought it used from his neighbor years ago, but he’s had difficulty maintaining it with parts that he said were often in short supply and often lagging behind demand. Warren figures that’s what led the Russian TV crew to ask him about it as they conducted an interview that took off on Russian social media.

“It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m just a super-duper normal guy,” Warren said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural, and for some reason they think it’s cool.”

It turns out they did, as in a matter of days, the Ural Gear Up that he is now driving away on was manufactured on Aug. 12, in Russia’s far east, but rapidly delivered to the States and Anchorage for Warren. Ural was founded as a motorcycle manufacturer in the city of Ural in western Siberia during World War II in 1941. But its modern operations are in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, where Ural’s motorcycles are now assembled. Ural has a U.S. sales and service operation in Woodinville, Washington.

Warren isn’t naive. He said that accepting the Russian motorcycle makes him a bit queasy for obvious reasons. “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.”

But Warren also says he is flattered by the gift. Warren and his wife, Brenda, rode off on their new motorcycle Tuesday afternoon after Russian reporters, photographers, and the like came and went on the occasion of their visit. Warren also insisted he signed no agreements with the Russians that obligate him beyond ownership of the motorcycle that has a registration plate with Russian and American flags as well as Trump and Putin silhouettes,, and his name, “MARK,” on it.

“I signed a document taking ownership of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy,” Warren said. “That’s about it.”

Warren sees no conflict with accepting the gift. It’s a nice gesture, he says, he’s not going to turn down. The paperwork confirms what Warren was told when he first got wind of the gift — that the motorcycle was manufactured just 12 hours before he got word of the gift, Warren said.

“The obvious thing here is that it rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours,” Warren said of the motorcycle’s swift delivery to Anchorage.