Lana Getting A New Gimmick And Breaking Away From Rusev?

Lana hasn’t been seen on WWE television since Rusev’s injury (unless you count Total Divas). When Rusev was announced he’d making a jump to SmackDown Live, the graphic they used didn’t feature Lana. Because the first time Rusev was drafted to Raw last year, WWE announced Handsome Rusev and Lana as a package deal. Many wondered (including us) if the two would be split up at that point.

Some of the speculation was answered when WWE aired a vignette later on in the show featuring Lana dancing around a chair. They seemingly promoted her as a singles act “coming soon” in the promo. We speculated on our own weekly detailed recap and analysis of SmackDown Live that it seemed Lana might have been given the gimmick that didn’t work for Emmalina. In the latest issue of The Observer, Dave Meltzer noted that it appears Lana and Rusev may be separated on WWE programming.

Lana has been working out in NXT since Rusev’s departure due to injury and it would seem WWE might finally be letting her have a go at in-ring competition on a regular basis.

There is still no word on if she’ll be keeping her Russian accent. But, this new character seems to be a departure from her Ravishing Russian persona, even though the promo video is still plenty ravishing. It honestly wouldn’t be much of a surprise if she dropped her Russian accent though because she’s already heavily featured on Total Divas speaking in her normal voice.

On another Lana-related story, it would seem she was recently detained at the Boston airport and given a rather hard time. Even though she only appeared on-screen in the vignette linked above she was apparently in the building just in case they needed her.

But traveling to her next destination seemed to be a turbulent experience before she even left the ground. Lana said she felt violated by the way she was treated by TSA employees and in her social media post concerning the incident she didn’t seem happy about it in the least. They better watch out for her, because Lana knows how to crush. After all, she learned from the best.