The 205th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade was formed by 1 May 1995 (although it marks its anniversary on 2 May) in accordance with a 17 March Minister of Defense directive during the First Chechen War.

The brigade was planned to be based in Grozny and Shali as part of a permanent Russian military presence in Chechnya, but was continuously engaged in the war from the beginning of its existence.

A proposal was made to reorganize the brigade to consist of two motor rifle regiments, the reconnaissance battalion, and the Spetsnaz company in May 1996, but this was not implemented due to being considered too cumbersome for the counterinsurgency war.

[3] During the war, the personnel of the brigade served at outposts and roadblocks, guarded important facilities, and often operated in conjunction with the Internal Troops in the suppression of Chechen resistance.

Brigade political officer Vyacheslav Izmailov, interviewed twenty years later, described his unit and the army in general as an "ill-trained rabble" only capable of "filling Chechnya with corpses" in a conflict that was "not a war, but banditry on both sides."

He recalled one incident in which more conscripts were sent to the unit than they had food supplies for, which resulted in them being sent back to Russia when the Khankala battalion commander found that his replacements were malnourished to the extent that they could not walk to the canteen on their own.

The brigade was further engaged in the elimination of militants in Grozny following a three-day siege of the Russian troops in March, and in the operations around the village of Shalazhi and Komsomolskoye in July.

The brigade received orders on the night of 7–8 August to break the encirclement of the government quarter in the city center using the assault detachments.

Kravtsov was posthumously made a Hero of the Russian Federation, but he was in fact killed by friendly fire according to Izmailov, who was with the reconnaissance battalion at the time.

The military justice system began to enforce discipline, with criminal cases for hazing, incitement to suicide, theft, and weapons selling, and punished the officers who had employed illegal disciplinary methods.

[2] During the War of Dagestan, the brigade participated in the elimination of Chechen fighters in the villages of Botlikh and Karamakhi during August and September 1999.

The Ukrainian General Staff reported on 3 March 2022 that elements of the brigade were sent into combat from the reserves in an attack towards the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia and Mariupol.

[13] According to Ukrainian officials, a unit of the brigade was responsible for the July 2022 deportation of 15 children from Novopetrivka, Mykolaiv Oblast, to Russian territory.