The ship struck an uncharted rock off the Finnish coast in June 1869 and damaged her bottom plating badly enough that she had to be run aground to prevent her from sinking.

Rusalka served her entire career with the Baltic Fleet and was assigned to the Artillery Training Detachment in March 1870.

Several hours after their departure the weather deteriorated into a storm, with gale force winds and rain; Tucha lost her charge from sight around noon, but sailed on and arrived safely at Helsingfors.

[8] No trace of the monitor was found until the corpse of a sailor in a dinghy and a few lifebuoys washed ashore on the Finnish island of Kremare.

In January 1894 a commission appointed to investigate convened and reprimanded Rear Admiral P. S. Burachek, commander of the detachment, for letting Rusalka go to sea in bad weather as well as Lushkov for losing contact with the monitor.

Either would have caused Rusalka to turn parallel to the waves where her superstructure would have been demolished and extensive flooding would have soon overwhelmed her small reserve of buoyancy.

[11] On 7 September 1902, the ninth anniversary of the loss of the ship, a monument to Rusalka (Estonian transliteration from Russian: Russalka) was erected in Tallinn.

[10] In spring 2003, a joint project was launched by the Estonian Maritime Museum and the commercial diving company Tuukritööde OÜ with the aim of finding Rusalka which had sunk 110 years earlier.

On 22 July 2003 the wreck of Rusalka was located in the Gulf of Finland, 25 kilometers (16 mi) south of Helsinki, by the museum's research vessel Mare.

[13] The divers found the stern of the lost vessel rising 33 meters (108 ft) above the sea bed and her rudder turned to starboard.