The Prospects spotlight is back with a triple edition featuring interviews with the young core of K27: Aleksey “xeedo” Mikulich (#3 HLTV Prospects), Danila “kashl1d” Dronov (#7) and Daniil “qw1nk1” Kabilov (#11).
xeedo was born and raised in the Belarusian town of Vitebsk, the hometown of modernist painter Marc Chagall. It’s where he played his first LANs and where he still lives to this day, although with all of the traveling brought on by a flourishing Counter-Strike career, he is rarely home.
K27’s Opener and highest-ranked player on the prospects list in October, xeedo, doesn’t remember the specifics of how he got into Counter-Strike. He was playing all sorts of games by the age of six, and CS was among them, although it wouldn’t be until his teenage years that he would take it more seriously, starting to play FACEIT in 2021.
Two years later, in 2023, he competed at his first LANs with friends. “There, a Belarusian scout with the nickname dstr noticed me,” he recalls. “He invited me to play a LAN in Minsk, where I then played several LANs.”
He played his first LAN in Minsk on a team with Svyatoslav “MaSvAl” Masko, another Belarusian player starting to make a name for himself with magic. “That’s when I realized I needed to grind and keep developing in this game,” xeedo says.
“I saw donk just tearing up the scene, I watched how he played, and that inspired me,” xeedo says. “It was one of the reasons I came back to CS”
At the time, xeedo wasn’t really watching any particular players and didn’t have anyone inspiring his play, but he continued to grind and grow and was picked up by Nemiga’s academy in 2022 before leaving the team in March 2023 and taking a hiatus from the game for six months.
“I saw donk just tearing up the scene,” xeedo says, “I watched how he played, and that inspired me. It was one of the reasons I came back to CS, I wanted to play like that too. And from that moment to this day, that role model has been donk.”
xeedo’s stylistic doppelgangers
The first thing xeedo did upon his return, now on CS2, was to start grinding FACEIT and breaking into the top 15 spots of the Elo ranking. “Some CIS teams noticed me and started trying me out,” he recalls, “I failed the tryout with a lot of teams, and one of them was Vaseline Worms. Legendary.”
Ivan “zweih” Gogin had just left the team for Nemiga and recommended xeedo. A week later, he had a message from coach Yuriy “Meand” Mandzhiev in his inbox. Two weeks later, he was on the team. “We were already called K27,” xeedo says. “That’s when Vanya Kondrat came in.”
By the time xeedo joined K27, he was ready to make that his priority over his university studies. “There weren’t any difficulties thanks to my older brother, who explained everything I was doing to my parents,” he says. “My whole family supported me pretty early on. The only difficulties could have been at university. I enrolled, went for a week, and stopped going. I ended up getting expelled, so there aren’t any more difficulties now.”
xeedo, part of the wave of aggressive riflers to pop up after the release of Counter-Strike 2 and Danil “donk” Kryshkovets’s trailblazing in the position, says great shooting, trying to be useful for the group, and being a well-rounded teammate are the traits he wants to stand out for.
Looking at his early development, xeedo says his first scout, Alexey “dstr” Baranov, got it all started. Then Vanya Kondrat, K27’s CEO, has been a big influence through his investment in the team, and finally in-game leader Daniil “X5G7V” Maryshev helped him develop an understanding of the game and its psychology.
“If we’re talking about goals, then I’d want to make it to a Major,” xeedo says of the future. “I’d want that to become the baseline for me, and to make it to every Major. And at the same time, I’d want to be a great player who shows every Tier S team a good level of Counter-Strike.”
“I’m from the city of Voronezh,” says kashl1d, the most vocal of K27’s three prospects and the one with the longest tenure on our prospects ranking — he has been on it since it was first published during the second half of 2025. “I lived there until I came of age, and then I moved to Moscow. I’m living there together with my friend, teammate, and lil’ bro qw1nk1. Well, I can’t say anything bad. My hometown is Voronezh, 36th region. Hi everyone!”
Like xeedo, kashl1d took on gaming early, playing CS for the first time at eight years old. “My dad got me into the game,” the 19-year-old recalls, “he downloaded Counter-Strike: Source for me, and I don’t know, do eight-year-olds go to school? So I’d come home after elementary school and play CS: Source. And then it just kind of snowballed from there.
A few years later, around 11 or 12, he made the jump to FACEIT and started streaming. Not long after, as a teenager, he saw potential in making a career out of it, but it wouldn’t be easy. “Initially, I had a lot of activities besides Counter-Strike, and my parents didn’t fully understand how serious this field was and how much I wanted to prove myself in it,” kashl1d says. “So there were difficulties combining school, sports, and Counter-Strike.”
That wouldn’t be his only problem, however, as kashl1d had a VAC ban from his pre-teen days lingering above him. “I had a wrongful VAC ban, which I was helped to get lifted, like a year ago,” he says. “And instead of five years, I would’ve had to sit out seven and couldn’t play a Major. So that’s probably the main difficulty.
“At eleven years old, I was playing matchmaking with a skin changer, with cheats and all that,” he explains. “My first VACs came at nine, I think; I got it around ten. And then around twelve I got my last one, for a skin changer. And when I turned fifteen, or fourteen, it got renewed, so instead of five years from the last ban I had to sit out seven or eight. For those three years, I was trying to prove that I needed amnesty.”
m0NESY and sh1ro are two of the players kashl1d names as early influences alongside s1mple
Having left the transgressions of his childhood behind, kashl1d made his first appearances on HLTV in 2023, but he already had players he was looking up to and trying to be like. “Originally, I’d say, for all snipers in 2021, it was Sasha s1mple,” he says. “Then, as time went on and Counter-Strike 2 came out, I had two guys I looked up to like they were gods of Counter-Strike, sh1ro and m0NESY.
“Then, over time, it got to where I don’t model myself after anyone. I just do it the way I see it, but there are still some remnants in my memory, like m0NESY, that’s just a god, basically. But it’s not like that anymore, where I put someone on a pedestal and think they’re super cool. There’s nothing like that now.”
kashl1d’s stylistic doppelgangers
There’s nothing particular that kashl1d says he stands out for. “I don’t have anything in my head I want to self-actualize,” he says. “At least there’s nothing like wanting to prove myself through some specific unique thing. I don’t know what makes me stand out compared to other players, but as they say, I’m just searching for myself in all of this. I’m trying to get to how I see the game and how I genuinely want to play, rather than being a copy of something or picking up someone else’s habits.”
kashl1d, along with xeedo, was one of the original K27 players signed from Vaseline Worms after talks with Kondrat. “Vanya came to us with an offer to sign us under an organization, and those negotiations were all held with me. That’s when we put the roster together, and later, once the organization existed, I brought in Danya qw1nk1. And that’s how it all started.”
kashl1d is grateful for the opportunity given to him by Kondrat. “Anyone who had a hand in my gameplay and tried to improve me and my understanding of the game overall, everyone deserves credit,” he says, “but the most important figure, I’d say, is still Vanya, probably him alone. He’s just done so much for us in terms of developing as players and as people, and overall in feeling what adult life is like. All the relocations, the flights — that’s all on his shoulders, so I’ll mention only him.
“At such a young age, he gave us the chance to feel a certain kind of freedom, to fly around the world, to fully experience in vivid colors what we’re working toward. And of course, obviously, my parents, because if it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have had a computer, and none of this would’ve happened.”
Regarding the future, internal validation is kashl1d’s measuring stick. “Since this is a competitive sport, most players find motivation in outdoing someone and climbing higher and higher,” he says. “As for me, I don’t really have a desire to prove anything to anyone except myself. I’m genuinely just curious how far I can get on my own, what kind of prime, so to speak, I’ll reach, and what kind of player I’ll ultimately become. And overall, in terms of goals, it’s just to keep improving and try to do the maximum I possibly can.”
qw1nk1 was born and raised in Lipetsk, where he lived until he was 17 before moving to the capital with kashl1d. “It was just generally fine; I went to school and came home to play,” he says. “I didn’t really do anything else, didn’t even go out around the city. Fine.”
The youngest of the three prospects, qw1nk1 was also the latest to take on the game. “I don’t remember exactly when the first time I played was, but I think my brother played it,” he recalls, “I think in 2022 I just started playing and would run around some pubs all the time. But as for playing FACEIT, no, that wasn’t a thing yet. I started playing FACEIT in the winter of 2022, I think. There wasn’t really an understanding that [I would go pro]. I was just playing FACEIT with friends at the end of 2022, and that’s it.”
qw1nk1 came into K27 a little bit later than kashl1d and xeedo, in October 2023, once the organization was already up and running. “On FACEIT you could tell he was a young guy,” kashl1d remembers, “he possibly hadn’t signed a contract yet with Spirit Academy, which recruits everyone, so there was a chance to snag a young player like that.”
It was only upon getting invited to K27 that qw1nk1 started to see a path. “As kash said, he noticed me, and then he messaged me one night, invited me into TeamSpeak to talk, and everything got sorted out there. That’s how I got invited.”
qw1nk1 didn’t look up to more established players or watch them for inspiration. “There wasn’t anyone like that,” he says, “and there isn’t now either. I’m just an Anchor, and I lurk my positions. Nothing else really happens.”
“Just GOAT,” kashl1d interjects. “He just does his own thing and doesn’t look at anything else. He has no enemies. He’s his own enemy, an enemy in the mirror.”
qw1nk1’s stylistic doppelgangers
Just like with players, qw1nk1 also doesn’t mention many people in his rise as a promising talent in the game. “Probably just my team, that’s it,” he says. “And the whole organization, nobody else.” Now, he hopes to make it to a Major and establish K27 as a top-15 team contending to win the big tier-one tournaments.
