An Alaskan has disclosed that Russian President Vladimir Putin gave him something worth more than $20,000 on his visit to the United States.
President Donald Trump welcomed his European counterpart to North America on Friday (August 15), hoping that his reputation as a dealmaker would allow him to single-handedly terminate Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Unfortunately, that did not happen, as the meeting ended without a peace agreement between the nations.
Still, Trump got to show off the US’s B-2 bomber, which he ordered to fly over Putin’s head, but the true winner of Putin’s visit to Anchorage has to be Mark Warren, a self-proclaimed’super-duper normal man’.
A Russian TV crew questioned the retiree, a fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage, as he was performing errands on his motorcycle a week before the summit.
He informed them it was a Ural motorcycle, which was founded in western Siberia in 1941, and that he bought it from a neighbor, before explaining that he was having trouble finding parts for it.
“It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m really just a super-duper normal guy,” Warren said yesterday.
“They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural, and for some reason they think it’s cool.”
Two days before Putin’s meeting with Trump, which fans joked was advertised as a boxing match by the White House administration, he was notified that the Russian government had decided to gift him a Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar.
The olive-green bicycle sells for $22,000.
He initially felt it was a fraud, but after Putin’s summit ended and he left Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, he received another call notifying him that the bike was still at the base.
“I dropped my jaw,” he said. “I went, ’You’ve got to be joking me’.”
When signing the paperwork for it, taking ownership of it from the Russian Embassy in the US, he spotted that it was manufactured on Tuesday last week.
Ural assembles its bikes in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, and distributes them through a team based in Woodinville, Washington.
“The obvious thing here is that it rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours,” he added.
