The Division's honorifics are 'Red Banner, Order of Kutuzov',[2] though an early Western writer reported them as 'Dneipr-Transbaikal' seemingly incorrectly, at one point in its history.

On 6 January 1959, the 110th Separate Military-Transport Aviation Squadron was formed with the division, equipped with ten Antonov An-2 transports.

As nationalist unrest grew in the southern republics of the USSR throughout the end of the 1980s, the division was deployed to Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1988 and to Fergana, Uzbekistan, in 1990.

This may have been because at that point in the coup, the Tamanskaya Division was in the process of switching its own allegiance from the plotters to the parliamentarians, but whatever Lebed's rationale, the episode helped to boost his own public profile immensely.

Following the failure of the coup and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1992, he was appointed commander of the Russian 14th Guards Army in Moldova.

With Moscow determined to avoid a repeat of the quagmire that the first war had become, the Russian force committed in 1999 was larger, better equipped and better organised.

In 2001, after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, paratroopers from the division were sent to Afghanistan to evacuate the staff of the Russian embassy in Kabul, so as to ensure their safety in the face of the American military campaign in support of the Northern Alliance's advance towards the city.

In March 2000, Novaya Gazeta journalist Pavel Voloshin reported the account of Private Alexei P. (later identified as Pinyaev) of the 137th Guards Airborne Regiment.

[5] According to Felshtinsky and Pribylovsky, after the newspaper report FSB officers descended on Pinyayev’s unit, accused them of divulging a state secret and told them, "You guys can't even imagine what serious business you’ve got yourselves tangled up in."

[6] A report aired by ORT in March 2000 and created by journalist Leonid Grozin and operator Dmitry Vishnevoy accused Novaya Gazeta of lying.

[7] At an FSB press conference in 2001, Private Pinyayev stated that there was no hexogen in the 137th Airborne Regiment and that he was hospitalised in December 1999 and no longer visited the test range.

[10] The division took part in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine but withdrew to Belarus at the end of March to be redeployed in Valuyki at the Eastern war theatre.