An Alaska resident received the surprise of a lifetime when Russian President Vladimir Putin’s team gifted him a brand-new motorcycle worth $22,000 (about Rs 19 lakh).

Mark Warren, a retired fire inspector from Anchorage, was presented with an olive-green Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar last week. The bike, manufactured on August 12, was flown into Alaska ahead of the US-Russia summit.

Warren, who already owned an older Ural motorcycle, first caught attention when a Russian TV crew spotted him while he was out running errands. During a brief interview, he mentioned the difficulty of finding spare parts for his Soviet-era-inspired bike. “It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m really just a super-duper normal guy. They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural and for some reason they think it’s cool,” Warren told CNN.

Just two days before the August 15 summit, a journalist informed Warren that he would be receiving a motorcycle. Initially, he dismissed it as a prank. But after the summit, he was directed to a hotel parking lot in Anchorage, where six men - whom he assumed were Russian delegates - stood next to the bike. “I dropped my jaw. I went, ‘You’ve got to be joking me,’” he recalled.

While completing paperwork to officially claim the motorcycle, Warren noticed its fresh manufacturing date. “The obvious thing here is that it rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours,” he remarked.

The keys were handed to him by Andrei Ledenev, an employee of the Russian Embassy in the United States. “I have to say that this is a personal gift from the President of the Russian Federation,” Ledenev said.

Warren wasted no time taking the motorcycle for a test ride, with Ledenev seated behind him and another man in the sidecar. “It’s night and day,” Warren said. “I like my old one, but this one is much better. I’m speechless, it’s amazing. Thank you very much,” he told Reuters.