WWE didn’t put out a press release. It didn’t need to. Sometime Thursday, Ilja Dragunov‘s bio quietly moved over to the alumni section of WWE.com, and that was the whole announcement.
According to Mike Johnson at PWInsider, Dragunov’s WWE contract has expired, and he’s exiting the company after seven years. Fightful confirmed the report, and F4W/WON and Wrestling Inc. independently corroborated it.
An Absence That Never Quite Resolved
Dragunov hasn’t wrestled since the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal on the April 17 episode of SmackDown, four months ago. For a while, the read on that absence shifted. Reporting over the summer, including from Wrestling Observer’s Bryan Alvarez, described it as more of a creative gap than an injury issue, with Dragunov continuing to train at Natalya and Tyson Kidd’s Dungeon 2.0 and staying ring-ready. As recently as July, word was he could be back “sooner than later.”
Instead, the contract ran out, and by all accounts it was Dragunov’s call. WWE, per the same reporting that broke the exit, would have liked to keep him.
Seven Years of the Hardest Style in the Building
Dragunov joined WWE in 2019 as part of the original NXT UK roster, and the signature win of that run came two years later. At NXT TakeOver 36 in August 2021, he made Gunther, then wrestling as WALTER, submit to end an 870-day reign as NXT UK Champion, one of the most bruising matches either man has ever had.
He carried that intensity across the Atlantic when NXT UK folded into the main NXT brand, beating Carmelo Hayes at NXT No Mercy in 2023 to win the NXT Championship, a reign he held for 206 days before dropping it to Trick Williams on his way out. That same year, WWE named him NXT Male Superstar of the Year.
The main roster call-up came on the Raw after WrestleMania XL, where he beat Shinsuke Nakamura in his debut match. A torn ACL cost him a full year on the shelf not long after, but he returned on the October 17, 2025 episode of SmackDown and beat Sami Zayn for the WWE United States Championship in the same match, closing out 2025 defending the title in open challenges.
What’s Next Is an Open Question
There’s no word yet on where Dragunov lands, and nothing confirmed beyond the exit itself. What’s certain is the body of work he leaves behind: an NXT UK Championship reign that ended one of the promotion’s defining runs, an NXT Championship reign that helped set up Trick Williams’s ascension, and a US Championship reign built on open challenges nobody particularly wanted to accept. Seven years, three championships, and a nickname, “The Mad Dragon,” that undersold how hard he actually hit.
