Legendary Counter Strike player Oleksandr ‘s1mple’ Kostyljev recently stated that he would never join Cloud9, one of the most prominent esports teams in the industry, because their roster is full of Russian players.
s1mple has been absent from the Counter-Strike 2 scene due to him taking a break from competition due to residency issues and due to Valve dealing with their newly released title, but says that he will return sometime after the PGL Copenhagen Major.
“I would never move to Cloud9 when there are four Russian players. It seems to me that every Ukrainian should understand this,” s1mple said, during an interview with Players (h/t Dexerto) via machine translation.
Cloud9 acquired Gambit Esports back in 2022 and they have a mostly Russian Counter-Strike roster in 2022.
