Hopelessly Hopeful

Typically KHL-VHL-JHL teams form a 'system' where VHL and JHL serve as farms for the first team, and this vertical line can even extend further down. IE in my city the KHL team, Avtomobilist, has its own VHL team, Gornyak-UGMK, and its own JHL team, Avto. (This means that they have the same main sponsor and are intertwined) We also have our own hockey school for kids under the age of 16 (when they can debut in the JHL), but it's not the only school in the city, the other prominent one being D13 (tied to Datsyuk - if you've paid attention to the draft you might've noticed there were quite a few kids out of D13, that's a different story).

So if you're born in our city and play hockey, you start at one of the hockey schools, and if you pick the Avto-connected one, then if you show some talent you go to the JHL team, from there you get summonned to the VHL team to taste 'men's hockey' and play at the adult level, if you're extra talented you get summonned to the KHL team before you age out of the JHL. Great examples of 'JHL aged but playing for the first team' are Yegor Surin (Nashville prospect, two-times Gagarin Cup winner, and the guy can play in the JHL for one more season but he obviously won't) and Alexander Zharovsky (Montreal prospect, best rookie in the KHL this year, widely considered to be one of the best young players, has another season in the JHL but hasn't set foot there since 24/25).

Now, if you're not from a hockey town like Gleb you will end up wandering. Like he was born in Almaty where he didn't get many chances to develop, so the family moved to Kaliningrad. When he was 12 he moved to Vityaz hockey school and lived at their boarding school (which is quite common at big hockey schools), and from there he went to Nizhny Novgorod, to the system of Torpedo which is their KHL team.

Now, not all systems are equal. Some KHL teams don't have their own VHL and/or JHL teams, so they partner with other cities' (like Lokomotiv has two JHL teams but no VHL team so they partner with another city's VHL team with no KHL presence). Torpedo as of season 25/26 had both VHL (Torpedo-Gorky) and JHL (Chaika) teams, and more importantly, they're known for being REALLY good for developing talent. The KHL team typically sucks, they're not seen as a serious force; this year they made it to quarterfinals but they lucked out with their 1/8th opponents. The JHL team, Chaika, though? They're scouting HARD. Four of Chaika's kids got drafted this year alone, and I'm sure if I combed their roster I'd see many more prospects worth following. This year they got to semifinals and lost to the team that ended up taking the cup (and then agreed that series with Chaika were harder than the final series against last year's cup holders). They habitually make it to the semifinals, have taken the cup a couple of times in recent history, and are generally considered to be a great team and a formidable opponent. With KHL team being kind of weak it's also easier for boys from Chaika to debut in the KHL; again, using Avtomobilist as an example. Avtomobilist's system is rich rich, so we can afford to buy adult talent for unreasonable salaries; as a result, our own local talent often ends up aging out of the JHL and going to the farm club and then just. Staying there before they get fed up. See the case of Nikita Novosyolov (a goalie that signed with Colorado because he realized his chances of playing in the KHL are minuscule).

So what happens in Gleb's case? He's obviously talented, so he debuts in the VHL first (scoring his first goal there against my city's VHL team, kind of hate this for us but love it for him), then he is invited to play for the KHL team, and he quickly shows that he is capable of competing with adult men, and that while he's still 17 years old. (In one of his first games in the KHL he got a dirty hit on him, and the hockey circles were kind of pissed because the referees either missed it or decided it was a clean hit, and there was much discussion of the incident, hopefully @kateandthehockey will add on that).