[7] The foundations of the Rusich group were laid in 2009, when a military training base was founded[8] by Alexey Milchakov, a neo-Nazi from Saint Petersburg.

[12] Both Milchakov and the nominal commander of the Wagner group Dmitry Utkin served in the 76th Guards Air Assault Division of the Airborne Forces.

One of the most well known operations of "Rusich" was the ambush of a column of the Ukrainian Aidar Battalion near the villages of Metalist and Tsvitni Pisky in the Luhansk Oblast on 5 September 2014, after a truce was supposed to have gone into effect.

[5][18] Andriy Khvedchak, coordinator of the Volyn Maidan Self-Defense, said that on 5 September 2014, a part of the company of the Aidar battalion was ambushed in the same place where Nadiya Savchenko was taken prisoner.

The commander called the Head of the Luhansk People's Republic Igor Plotnitsky and the government of the LPR “whore children” and said that his unit would fight “against them and against the Ukrainians”.

[28] The online edition "Belarusian Partizan" calls the "raccoons" a group of Russian militants who took part in the war in Donbass from its very beginning, and that they are close friends with Milchakov.

[29] In 2016, Milchakov, as a member of the "Union of Volunteers of Donbass", may have been presented with an award by the head of the Republic of Crimea Sergey Aksyonov in the presence of the then assistant to the President of the Russian Federation Vladislav Surkov.

[30] Milchakov's deputy, Jan Petrovsky, is a former resident of Norway, where he lived and worked with a Norwegian associated with the far-right groups Soldiers of Odin and Nordic Resistance Movement.

[31][32][33][34][30] The peculiar glory of the Russian in the conflict in Donbass, apparently, was the last straw for the Norwegian authorities, and he was finally recognized as a threat to national security.

[24] In 2017, Rusich militants showed up in Syria guarding the strategically important oil and gas infrastructure owned by Russian companies.

On their (now inaccessible) Instagram account, the militants posted photos from Palmyra in central Syria, where one of them poses in front of ancient ruins, raising his hand in a Nazi salute.

[44] In 2022, the detachment and its commanders Alexey Milchakov and Yan Petrovsky were included in the US sanctions list for their "special cruelty" in the battles in the Kharkiv Oblast.

[53] In April 2023, the Rusich Group posted a video on their Telegram channel showing a captured Ukrainian soldier being beheaded with a knife, together with a caption stating that many more are to come.

[60] The Rusich Group issued an ultimatum to the Russian government that they will not participate in any combat in Ukraine until Russia secured the release of Petrovsky.

The group had been fighting on the Robotyne-Verbove line, defending the sector from the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive, with their absence likely exacerbating Russian tactical losses in the region.

[62] On August 19, 2024 Rusich asked for a Ukrainian prisoner to be surrendered to them for a human sacrifice for "autumnal equinox to encourage and strengthen the spirit of the new personnel of the unit".

"[73] The following are used as symbols of the group: runes, in particular Tiwaz (ᛏ)[42] (meaning the god of military prowess Týr), the eight-rayed Kolovrat, Valknut, and code slogans.

Polish neo-Nazis from "Zadrużny Krąg - Slavic Division" led by former police officer Arwid Pływaczewski have joined Rusich.