AJ Styles found out about Ilja Dragunov leaving WWE the same way everybody else did, and says he has no idea what happened.
Dragunov’s departure was reported by Mike Johnson of PWInsider on Thursday and confirmed by Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful Select the same day. WWE moved him to the alumni section of its website within hours. He had not wrestled since the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal on the April 17th SmackDown, ahead of WrestleMania 42.
Styles was asked about it on The AJ Styles Show.
“I don’t know anything about it. I know that I’m very sad about this situation. I enjoy his work very much. So I don’t know what’s going on.”
He explained why being under contract does not mean being informed.
“I can’t say much about it because, again, you’d think I’d know. I work for the company, but my place is in the coaching and the talent and little things to hopefully help make WWE better and build that foundation for them with the younger talent and stuff like that. So I don’t know what was going on. I just know, holy crap. That’s about all I know.”
Styles retired in January and has spent recent months coaching at the Performance Center, covering for a colleague recovering from knee surgery, and producing on NXT.
He said nobody should draw conclusions yet.
“Throws you off, doesn’t it? He seems like all the things that we want. We’re gonna have to wait and see what he says about the situation when he’s able to talk about it, and then we’ll all know the truth, because we can speculate everything at what this is. The truth is, we don’t know.”
“I’ll be the first one to tell you I thought the guy was awesome. So I don’t know.”
Dragunov has not commented publicly.
What has emerged since the initial report suggests the decision was his. False Finish reported that WWE wanted him to stay and that he chose to let the contract run out. Dave Meltzer wrote in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter that Dragunov had been on a good deal that was coming to an end, that the two sides were far enough apart on the new one, and that the view inside WWE was that he was a great worker rather than a draw, which did not support the money he was asking for. Meltzer’s account is that the negotiations are why he was kept off television from April onwards, rather than the absence being a booking decision that came first.
The Observer and False Finish also reported that the two sides had been discussing a SmackDown return for him as recently as June before the talks broke down.
The circumstances of his last year explain some of the frustration. Dragunov signed with WWE in 2019, ended Gunther’s long NXT UK Championship reign, and later held the NXT Championship as well. He was called up in the 2024 draft, tore his ACL in a live event match against Gunther, and was out for around a year.
He returned in October 2025 and beat Sami Zayn for the United States Championship in his first match back, holding it for 63 days before losing it to Carmelo Hayes. His appearances dropped off sharply from there. He had a rematch with Hayes in January, was in the Royal Rumble, and worked the Andre battle royal in April—nothing since.
Fightful reported he had kept training throughout the period he was off television. Bryan Alvarez had said in June he was working at Natalya and Tyson Kidd’s Dungeon 2.0 alongside his wife, the former NXT wrestler Jin Tala.
Styles is not the only person to have been caught out by it. The departure had been rumored a week earlier by an account with no sourcing, which Sapp publicly dismissed at the time and which the account behind it later admitted was an opinion rather than a report.
Two practical points follow from the contract having expired rather than been terminated. Meltzer noted that Dragunov has used the name since 2012, which gives him prior-use grounds to keep it, and that an expired deal does not carry the restrictions a release would. AEW’s Kyle Fletcher has already floated the idea of working him again.
