Putin gifts random American present worth over $20,000 that flew to Alaska with him for Trump meeting
Topics: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Russia, Alaska
Joe Yates
Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/Andrew Harnik
Topics: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Russia, Alaska
An Alaskan has revealed that Russian President Vladimir Putin gifted him something worth more than $20,000 during his trip to the US.
President Donald Trump welcomed his European counterpart to North America on Friday (August 15) as the Republican hoped his reputation of being a dealmaker could see him single-handedly bring Russia's invasion of Ukraine to an end.
Unfortunately, that didn't materialise as the meeting concluded without a peace deal between the nations.
Still, Trump got to show off the US' B-2 bomber, which he ordered to fly over Putin's head, but the real winner to come out of Putin's visit to Anchorage has to be Mark Warren - a self-proclaimed 'super-duper normal guy'.
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The pensioner, who worked for the Municipality of Anchorage as a fire inspector, was interviewed while out running errands on his motorcycle by a Russian TV crew a week prior to the summit taking place.
He told them that it is a Ural motorbike - a company that was founded in western Siberia back in 1941 - and that he purchased it from a neighbor, before explaining that he's had difficulty obtaining parts for it.
Surprisingly, Warren shot to internet fame in Russia.
"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 prior to Putin's meeting with Trump, which fans joked was billed as a boxing showdown by the POTUS' administration, he was informed that the Russian government had decided to gift him a Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar.
The olive-green bike retails for $22,000.
At first he thought it was a scam, but after Putin's summit concluded and he departed Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, he got another call informing him the bike was 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.