Twice in seven years Baltika has pulled off the same trick: take a goalkeeper nobody really knew and turn him into one of the best in the country. Now it's trying a third time - with the very man it all started with.
In a single week the club completed two deals. Maksim Borisko, one of the best goalkeepers of last RPL season, officially became a CSKA player: a 3+1 contract, the number 39 shirt and a fee, according to media reports, of around 180 million roubles.
Does 180 million seem small? Let's go through the history. Only one confirmed case of a bigger fee for a goalkeeper within the Russian championship exists: in 2016 (ten years ago, before Covid and the war, in the fat years) Spartak paid Amkar around 3.5 million euros for Selikhov - roughly 240 million roubles at the exchange rate of the time. Next to it is Gabulov to Anzhi in 2011 (a full 15 years ago): about 4 million euros, 160-170 million roubles at that rate. So Borisko is probably the second-largest domestic goalkeeper transfer in rouble terms and one of the three biggest in the history of the championship.
And in his place returns a man who has already made this journey once: Yevgeny Latyshonok. A Russian championship gold medallist, twice a national-team goalkeeper (Vietnam and Grenada), who lost his place in the Zenit side over the course of last season.
The structure of the deal is exotic: Latyshonok is bought by Nizhny Novgorod of the First League and immediately loaned to Kaliningrad - with no option to buy. First, though, on why this return shouldn't be read as a defeat.
A career that was never supposed to happen
Nothing in this story was supposed to work out. The boy from Maykop wasn't taken on by Kuban. At the Krasnodar academy he got as far as the reserves - and got stuck behind Safonov, Adamov and Agkatsev. Latyshonok himself summed up that time in one word - "mannequin": he'd turn up to train with the first team one day, the second team the next, the third team after that. Once they rang him at night and sent him to Vladivostok - to sit on the bench. He flew. They didn't need him there either.
To pull him out of this vicious circle, his agent bought out half the transfer from his own pocket - the whole deal cost Baltika one and a half million roubles. Then came a chain that's hard to believe: Kaliningrad, promotion to the RPL, the prize for the Cup's best goalkeeper, the Russian national team, Zenit, championship gold. And now - Kaliningrad again. It makes for a story rare in Russian football: a club first raised a goalkeeper for the national champions, and two years later got the chance to work with him again - at a new stage of his career.
The man who can't be second
In summer 2024, right after his move to Zenit, Latyshonok gave a big interview to Championat and said something that today reads like a sentence passed on himself:
"I can't sit on the bench at all. I categorically don't know how to be second or third. If I know there's no chance of being first, I won't go for any money. At least not until I'm 35."
A year passed - and what he feared came to pass. From the fifth round of the 2025/26 season Zenit's goal was taken by Denis Adamov - known to Latyshonok from the Krasnodar system. Years later it was he who finally pushed Yevgeny out of the side. A unique case by Zenit's standards: Lunev, Kerzhakov, Adamov himself all came back into the first team after a spell on the bench, but Latyshonok became the only fit goalkeeper of the Semak era who, after his mistakes, was never given a single chance to return to the starting line-up - as the Telegram channel @openthedoors pointed out.
Here's the detail that explains Latyshonok's whole career. In 2019 he left Krasnodar because he wanted to play. In 2024 he left Baltika because he wanted to get better - he turned down Spartak, who were offering more money, and admitted that before signing his Zenit contract he didn't even know exactly what his salary would be. In 2026 he leaves Zenit because, again, he wants to play.
Look at Latyshonok's whole career and the pattern becomes obvious: he never went where they paid more, he went where he saw the next step in his profession. Every major decision this man has made has been for football. Money was never once the argument - even as a top-club goalkeeper he kept repeating: "Personally, 30 thousand a month is enough for me."
Why Baltika
Latyshonok is not from Kaliningrad. He was born in the stanitsa of Giaginskaya in Adygea and grew up in Maykop, in a three-room flat shared by seven people. So he's not coming home. He's coming back to the place where he first felt like a real footballer.
Baltika gave him what Krasnodar didn't- the right to make mistakes and keep playing anyway. It was in Kaliningrad that he stopped being a "mannequin" at other people's training sessions and became the team's number one. Yevgeny Kaleshin called up a free agent nobody was expecting. Sergei Ignashevich trusted him enough to call him "Yevgeny Yashin" - his teammates preferred "Spider-Man". In five years - 127 matches, 47 clean sheets, promotion to the RPL and the Cup spring of 2024, when supporters gave him 62% of the vote for the tournament's best goalkeeper.
That semi-final against Spartak is the central scene of his Kaliningrad life. Evening, 1:0, seven shots on target - all saved. A tired goalkeeper walks through the mixed zone and someone asks who he wants in the final - Zenit or CSKA. Latyshonok answers with a two-word phrase that television can't broadcast and the country instantly turns into memes in its censored version: "Baltika, damn it." Later he'd admit he didn't even remember the moment - he just wanted to be left alone.
One brilliant season
At Zenit, Latyshonok had the statistically best season of his career. In the 2024/25 championship he played 27 matches, kept 16 clean sheets, saved 84.4% of shots and conceded an average of 0.5 goals a game. According to Sofascore his season rating was 7.16, with four team-of-the-week appearances. In autumn 2024 he was among the top three goalkeepers in Europe by clean-sheet percentage. In his debut game he won the Super Cup; in September he debuted for the national team.
And then everything broke - fast and almost without warning. The start of 2025/26: four matches, no clean sheets, 58% of shots saved. Sergei Semak put it carefully: "He isn't making mistakes. That he isn't bailing us out - unfortunately, that's how it is for now." Vyacheslav Malafeev made the more precise diagnosis: "It's all more in his head - in terms of qualities, he and Adamov are equal." Latyshonok himself, in November, was harsher than either: "I failed the first part of the season, I was all over the place."
Then came the role of Cup goalkeeper and the bench. He began the title-winning season as a contender for the goal and finished it a long way behind Adamov.
It's not just in the head
But reducing everything to psychology is a simplification. There's a footballing explanation too, and it's more interesting.
Latyshonok is a classic goal-line keeper: elite reactions, spring, command of corners, the ability to organise the defence at set pieces. Exactly what a team defending in a low block needs. That's how Baltika played - and that's how it plays under Talalaev now.
How different these two lives of his were is shown by a pair of numbers from @openthedoors: the total danger of shots on target faced by Baltika in 2023/24 - 39.88 xG, by Zenit in 2024/25 - 18.4. The workload differed by a factor of two - and in both modes Latyshonok was excellent on his line. In 2023/24 he prevented 4.88 goals - the best figure in the RPL, just above Safonov, while the rest of the league's goalkeepers didn't even reach two. In 2024/25 - already 5.4 goals prevented and top three in the league among first-choice goalkeepers.
Zenit demands something else: a high line, short build-up, a sweeper-keeper. That said, the cliché "Latyshonok is bad with his feet" needs a more precise wording: his weak spot isn't distribution but short passing under pressure. The memorable gift in the match against Rostov happened exactly there: an attempt to shift the ball onto his weaker left foot under pressing - and a goal. In Petersburg his profile simply stopped matching the team's requirements. He didn't become a bad goalkeeper - he turned out to be a good goalkeeper in the wrong system. And Baltika doesn't ask its goalkeeper for short build-up - from the goal it plays targeted long balls to the striker or the half-space, for the second-ball battle. In that sense the return to Baltika isn't a step back but a return to the context he was built for.
The goalkeeper factory
A separate plot line is the swap itself. Borisko and Latyshonok arrived at Baltika in the same summer of 2019, both free agents, both from Krasnodar Krai, a month apart. Latyshonok won that competition - and left for a top club. The irony is that two years later it was Borisko who found himself in the role Latyshonok once occupied: bought by one of the Russian giants. And his place is taken by Latyshonok.
So for the second time running, Baltika turns the goalkeeping position into a factory: take an undervalued player, let him play, sell him upwards - and immediately find the next one. Andrei Talalaev, admittedly, called the sale of Borisko "a shot to the head". But replacing him with someone of a comparable ceiling is almost impossible in Russia today. Latyshonok is just about the only exception.
And one non-football detail: with him returns his wife Violetta - to a city that, by Latyshonok's own admission, she never stopped loving.
The deal was made possible by a third party. This summer Nizhny Novgorod stopped being Pari NN: the club changed its founder, businessman Andrei Artyomov became its key shareholder, and state funding ceased. The new private club declares the goal of returning to the RPL. The transfer is already official: Nizhny signed Latyshonok to a three-year contract. For the new owner this could be an investment story: acquire the rights to a Russia goalkeeper while keeping him playing regularly in the RPL. And if the rumour that the loan carries no option to buy is true, the logic is even more transparent: in a year Latyshonok returns to Nizhny - possibly already in the RPL, if the club achieves promotion. For Baltika this means the story may be designed for one season, or it may not; who can tell right now?
What could go wrong
In fairness - there are risks. Latyshonok has gone almost a year without regular league football. The psychology question hasn't gone anywhere: "it's all in his head" cuts both ways.
The main question, though, concerns this team's chief goalkeeping tool: the long pass. Here the numbers are more interesting than the clichés. Borisko was Baltika's deep-lying playmaker: 9.2 accurate long passes per match at 40% accuracy - meaning around 23 attempts a game, most often into a duel. His overall pass accuracy was 49%, and while he was accurate 77% of the time in his own half, in the opposition half it was only 35% (Sofascore data). The decoding is simple: almost everything that goes forward goes into a contest. That's not a weakness but a team mechanism: the goalkeeper launched the attack via the second-ball battle.
Latyshonok's profile is different. In his best season, 2024/25, he made 16.4 passes per match at 76% accuracy, of which four or five a game were accurate long passes, but at 46% accuracy (Sofascore again). So on the quality of the long pass he's formally ahead of Borisko; on volume he's half as much. The comparison isn't entirely fair - at Zenit he went long in calmer conditions - but the long pass is generally his main asset with his feet: even in the failed stretch of 2025/26 he found his man with 51% of long balls, and by accurate long passes he was in the top 2% of the league's goalkeepers according to Sofascore. And across the whole of 2024/25 he was charged with not a single error leading to a shot or a goal. His weak spot - short build-up under pressing - hardly arises in Talalaev's system. One question remains open: can he handle Borisko's volume - twenty-odd long balls a match, into contests. There simply is no such data on Latyshonok - the Baltika of 2019-2024 didn't yet play that kind of football.
But all these risks share one property: they are cured by playing. And playing is the only thing he truly asks of football.
In place of an epilogue
Seven years ago Yevgeny Latyshonok left Krasnodar because he was tired of being a "mannequin". Two years ago he left Kaliningrad because he couldn't turn down a dream. Now he's coming back. Not because the dream is over. But because he once again wants to do the thing he became a goalkeeper for in the first place.
To play.
Everything else in his career has always happened after that choice.
And that is exactly why the return to Kaliningrad looks not like a step back but like the logical continuation of the road.
And that is exactly why you should subscribe to my Telegram channelhttps://t.me/BalticaB
