Ruslan Skvortsov was born in Yelets, Lipetsk Oblast, where he received his early training from Elena Timofeyeva,[2] and then studied at the Moscow Choreographic Academy with Vyacheslav Mikhaylov.

[7] Skvortsov made his debut as the soloist of the Fourth Movement of George Balanchine's Symphony in C in 1999 and danced his first leading role in an evening-length ballet, Little Count Cherry in Cipollino, in 2000, followed by the Poet in Michel Fokine's Chopiniana in 2001.

He first danced Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake in 2002, followed by debuts as Count Albrecht in Giselle, Lord Wilson/Ta-Hor in The Pharaoh's Daughter, Claude Frollo in Roland Petit's Notre-Dame de Paris and the Ballet Dancer in Alexei Ratmansky's The Bright Stream in 2003.

[3] Further debuts followed as Boris in Yuri Grigorovich's The Golden Age (2006), Don José in Carmen Suite (2007), James in La Sylphide (2008), Prince Désiré in The Sleeping Beauty (2008), Conrad in Le Corsaire (2009), Romeo in Grigorovich's production of Romeo and Juliet (2010), the title role in John Cranko's Onegin (2013) and Des Grieux in Neumeier's The Lady of the Camellias (2014).

At the Bolshoi Ballet he was the first to perform the roles of Antoine Mistral in Ratmansky's Flames of Paris (2008), Lucien d'Hervilly in Yuri Burlaka's staging of the grand pas from Paquita (2008), Frantz in Sergei Vikharev's reconstruction of Coppélia (2009), Phoebus in Esmeralda (2009), staged by Burlaka and Vasily Medvedev, and My Father, My Hero in Maurice Béjart's Gaîté Parisienne (2019).