Ukrainian esports organisation, Natus Vincere’s CEO Yevhen Zolotarov spoke to the Washington Post in an interview to give an insight into the Current state of the country, during war, how the org is dealing with it and competing despite the invasion and also about the future plans of the rosters that they currently have.
Zolotarov didn’t shy away from saying that there may arise a situation wherein they will have to part with members of their roster that live in Russia.
According to him, anyone who lives in Russia and pays taxes to the Russian federation will be cut from the roster and they won’t be working with them. “We are not going to work with people who live in Russia and who pay taxes to the Russian Federation,” he said.
The brunt of this could be faced by NaVi’s CSGO roster which has 3 members that are Russian. Denis “electroNic” Sharipov, Kirill “Boombl4” Mikhailov, and Ilya “Perfecto” Zalutskiy, are all Russian and were part of the roster that brought NaVi their most successful year in CSGO.
In 2021, NaVi won the first CSGO Major in 2 years, alongside a plethora of other trophies such as IEM Cologne 2021, BLAST World Finals, ESL Pro League S14 among others.
But as things stand, they will be given the option to relocate and acquire passports from other countries. The org doesn’t want anyone associated with the Russian federation working with them but if the players don’t share their countries politics, they will remain a part of NaVi.
“We hope that we are going to keep this roster and that the Russia-based players are going to relocate.” said Zolotarov when asked about the state of the CSGO roster, having more Russian players than Ukrainians.
NaVi took part in IEM Katowice, just days after Ukraine was invaded and it was obvious that it affected the players. They lost to G2 in the semis and went home in 3-4th place. They are the current champions of ESL Pro League, as they won the 14th season to secure the Intel Grand Slam. They will start their EPL S15 Campaign vs AGO tomorrow.