The film begins in 1989 when Sergeant Alexander (Sasha) Belov, (nicknamed Bely, or white) has finished his national service in the Soviet Border Troops, and returns to his home in Moscow.

His return, however, shows that perestroika has deeply transformed the Soviet Union life and both Kosmos and Pchyola have turned to criminal racket on Moscow's markets.

His ambitions are lost when a doctor diagnoses him with early symptoms of Parkinson's disease and does not allow him to continue boxing, yet at the same time offers him to compete in an underground Mixed martial arts club.

The next morning Mukha's body is found in the hangar where the fight took place and Kaverin bribes the investigator to consider Belov the prime suspect.

The date ends abruptly when Olga, waiting for Sasha to return from repairing a broken heel on her shoe, notices a wanted poster on the train platform with his face and name.

Sasha's friends decide to lift his spirits, and with Fil's sport contacts "recruit" a group of four female swimmers, whom they drive to the Dacha for a party that ends with couples pairing off for sex.

Having arrived too late to break up the party, he, however, discerns Belov's face, and upon returning to his station recognizes him on the wanted poster and immediately calls the OMON (armed police squad) for an arrest.

The film picks up in 1991 and the viewer learns that Sasha, after one and a half years of hiding in the Urals, decided that a criminal life would be natural after what has happened.

However, this almost ends in disaster when the hem of Olga's wedding gown gets tangled in a wire attached to the pin of a hand grenade, neatly set up right across the front door of their apartment.

Sasha manages to grab the armed grenade and throw it into the stairwell after a neighbour's dog rushed to rip the wire and release the pin.

Simultaneously the original Aluminium producer from Tajikistan calls for the Tajik mafia to move in against Belov for hijacking their deal, as Artur paid only half the fee.

The 1991 part of the film finishes when Olga and Sasha pause their love-making when they become aware that the television is broadcasting the same Swan Lake on all channels, which a Russian viewer will know is the beginning of the 1991 August Coup which brought the end of the Soviet Union.

Although the two parties do not approach each other, they describe what they know of their friends, and that Kaverin, after leaving the MVD, now works for a private security firm with criminal activities, headed by Bek.

The action on New Year's Eve alternates between Sasha and Olga at a performance of Tchaikovsky's Waltz from Swan Lake and various locations in Moscow where Bek himself and his group are killed in retaliation for Farik's death.

However, the KGB (now FSK) want the arms deal to progress, and have Luka's men attack Sasha when he is visiting with Olga and Ivan to his mother's flat.

Belov continues his attempts in legalising the Brigada's activities and secures a deal with Viktor Petrovich for a set of alcohol and tobacco licenses.

Night falls, and Fil is still under surgery, Olga meanwhile is learning to drive with Maks (now her and Ivan's personal bodyguard), on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where Pchyola catches up with her.

At the hospital Pchyola is met with Bely and Kosmos holding pistols, they are interrupted by a nurse asking for anyone with Type B negative blood for Fil.

Sasha shouts at Olga, but Maks intervenes and plays the tape, which shows how Gordon plants the bomb inside the head of mannequin that Fil brought with him.

The murder of a famous film producer generates a massive media outrage about the mafia, and Olga takes Ivan and leaves Sasha.

Shmit, Pchyola and Kosmos pay Gordon's assassin, but after he leaves the cafe, a SOBR unit arrests them, drives into the woods, where the three are forced to dig a grave for themselves under gunpoint.

Viktor Petrovich tells him that it was carried out by a militsiya commander, who after Gordon's death sends a warning that there were still law and order who could crush Bely and his Brigada should this happen again.

Pchyola and Kosmos come out into the snow-covered courtyard to greet them, and see Sasha's red armoured SUV driven alone by Maks, who climbs out and stabs the two.

Meeting up with Vvedensky Sasha learns that Maksim Karelskiy, despite working for eight years for Belov, and several times rescuing both him, his family and Pchyola from Bely himself, was nonetheless a mole for Kaverin since 1991.

Vvedensky along with Viktor Petrovich, the whole underground criminal world, and even Yuri Rostislavovich (Kosmos's father), all ask that Belov should not seek revenge.

Seeing a final end to his lifelong rival, he and Artur engage in a joint business venture, and are examining a construction site that is soon to open as a new shopping centre.

The film ends in spring when snow melted, Sasha once again visits Sparrow Hills, this time alone, and remembers how nine years ago he swore to always stand for his brothers.

[1] A striking example of this is the fate that befell Leonid Sidorov — the son of the Director of the series, who from the age of 8 was kept in a boarding school, because his parents were deprived of the rights to his education.

As a difficult teenager, at the peak of the popularity of the "Brigade" in the mid-2000s, he put together a gang around him, whose members appearance and relationships with each other imitated the main characters of the series; for himself, Leonid chose the image of "Space".

In 2018 Pavel Maykov, the performer of the role of "The Bee" called the "Brigade" a crime against Russia in which he participated, and explained that the harm of the series is that because of him, "the boys wanted to become bandits".