Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Russian Armed Forces were formally established on the 7th of May 1992, when Boris Yeltsin signed the founding decree. A summit in Kazakhstan on the 21st of December 1991 had temporarily appointed Marshal of Aviation Yevgeny Shaposhnikov as CIS military commander, but attempts to maintain a unified Commonwealth of Independent States force failed, making a separate Russian military necessary.
The official Russian military death figure for the First Chechen War (December 1994 to August 1996) was 5,732, though most estimates ranged between 3,500 and 7,500, with some as high as 14,000. Civilian losses were estimated at between 30,000 and 100,000 killed, over 200,000 injured, and more than 500,000 displaced. Chechen fighter deaths were estimated at roughly 3,000 to over 17,000.
The New Look reforms were announced by Defence Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov on the 14th of October 2008, following Russia's poor performance in the Georgian war. Key changes included reducing active personnel to one million by 2012, cutting the officer corps from 365,000 to 220,000, consolidating officer training from 65 military schools into 10 centres, eliminating warrant officer grades entirely, and replacing the four-level command chain with a three-level brigade-based structure.
Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 following the removal of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych on the 22nd of February 2014. Russian soldiers without insignias seized strategic positions on the peninsula, and the Federation Council unanimously petitioned President Putin to use military force in Ukraine on the 1st of March 2014. Armed conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Russian-backed separatist formations began in the Donbas in April 2014.
By the 30th of June 2024, Russian independent outlet Meduza estimated 120,000 Russian soldiers had been killed. The Economist, using a wounded-to-killed ratio from leaked United States Department of Defense documents, calculated between 462,000 and 728,000 soldiers killed or wounded in total. NATO and Western military officials reported around 1,200 Russian soldiers killed or wounded per day on average in May and June 2024, primarily due to human wave attacks.
Russia began military intervention in the Syrian civil war in September 2015, after a formal request from the Syrian government, operating airstrikes from the Khmeimim base against groups including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, al-Nusra Front, and the Syrian National Coalition. Russian special operations forces and military advisers were also deployed. The Russian government announced its troops would remain in Syria permanently at the end of December 2017. The Russian-backed Assad government fell in December 2024, and Bashar al-Assad was given refuge in Moscow.