Andrei Svechnikov has two locations listed in his Instagram bio. One is Raleigh, North Carolina, where the Carolina Hurricanes star has played for the past four seasons. The other is Kazan, the Russian city where his family lived after stops in Moscow and Siberia.
Svechnikov is Russian, a designation that's taken on a different context over the past two weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his army to invade Ukraine. The NHL, never known for emphatic political stances, released a statement that "condemns Russia's invasion of Ukraine and urges a peaceful resolution as quickly as possible.