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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — At a summit that has had a long list of winners and losers, one man may have come out on top: a fire inspector who used his retired cop-on-the-corner look to casually cruise down an Anchorage street and away with the jackpot, a $22,000 motorcycle from the Russian government.

Fire inspector-turned-retiree Mark Warren has run errands for 20 years on his original Ural, a second-hand motorcycle he bought from a neighbor. It’s a clunker now, in need of parts, and supply is an issue. When demand can outstrip the supply, as it frequently does, it’s difficult to keep one running, Warren said.

His troubles in keeping his Ural rideable were not what the Russian TV crew was looking for, but it was all the Alaska motorcyclist would share about his experience with his nearly six-minute-long interview. The man “couldn’t think of anything else,” Warren said.

On July 31, a crew from the Russian state-run Channel One TV stopped him and asked for an interview. Warren, 63, did not think much of it at the time. “Honestly, it was a waste of time,” Warren said of the interview experience.

But then it went viral, he said. “I’m a typical middle-aged guy who has not done a whole lot in his life. But it went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why because I’m just a super-duper normal guy,” he said in an interview on Tuesday.

They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural, and for some reason they think it’s cool,” he said. “It was like, ‘Wow, you ride a Ural? That’s cool. Oh, it’s a classic?”’

In Russia, the interview drew 200 million hits. He didn’t know anyone was watching, let alone when he was at a truck stop the day before the summit and had received a phone call from the reporter he had first interviewed.

The Russian journalist told him on Aug. 13 that the bike would be his. He laughed it off and thought it was a joke. After all, it had been two days since then-President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage for a three-hour summit on July 16 to discuss Russia’s war in Ukraine. Trump had already left Alaska by the time Warren was notified a day after the summit by the same Russian journalist who had interviewed him,that his bike was already in Anchorage.

They told Warren the motorcycle would be at a hotel the next day, so the couple went. He wasn’t sure what to expect. At the hotel, in the parking lot, there were six men he presumed were Russians, and there in the lot was the olive-green motorcycle, a Ural Gear Up model with a sidecar.

“It went off the assembly line on the 12th of August,” Warren said. “It was new. And the box was still sealed.” He added, “I dropped my jaw. I went, ‘You’ve got to be joking me.’”

In Russia, Ural was founded in 1941 in the Soviet Union’s western Siberia and now assembles the motorcycles in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, with a U.S. distribution center in Woodinville, Washington.

The Russians asked to take his photo, interview him, and film him with the motorcycle, he said. They asked for nothing else in return.

Warren obliged, even as he went around the hotel’s parking lot three or four times, a cameraman jogging behind him. Two reporters and a Russian consulate member piled into the sidecar as Warren took the bike for a spin.

“They gave me no reason not to take it, I guess,” Warren said, even as he was wary about accepting a gift from a foreign government, especially one such as Russia’s with which the United States has a strained relationship.

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 only form he signed, he said, was the paperwork to take ownership of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy. It’s how Warren first knew the motorcycle had been made the day before he had been told he was getting one.

“The obvious thing here is that it rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours,” Warren said. “From there, nobody knows how it got here.”

In the end, Warren said he is appreciative, despite what might appear to some as the political symbolism of riding home from a hotel parking lot on a motorcycle gifted to him by Russia, a gesture President Joe Biden has said is being reconsidered with the view of seizing back properties built with ill-gotten wealth from corrupt Russian oligarchs.

Warren said he’s not as concerned about the optics because, well, he didn’t do anything. “It’s a motorcycle that just happened to come with Russian paint on it, but I didn’t steal it. I didn’t do anything other than be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.

When he was first approached for the interview, he hadn’t taken any pictures of his Ural motorcycle, so he would know how much it was worth.

“They wanted an interview, and I gave them an interview. After that, the free motorcycle, I couldn’t have planned it any better than that,” he said, calling the $22,000 motorcycle “worth a heck of a lot more than anything I could have bought it for.”