Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Rus were a people of early medieval Eastern Europe. Scholarly consensus holds they were originally Norsemen, mainly from present-day Sweden, who settled and ruled along the river-routes between the Baltic and the Black Sea from around the 8th to the 11th centuries.
The name Rusʹ is generally considered a borrowing from the Finnic word Ruotsi, meaning Sweden. It is traced either to the Old East Norse word rōþer, referring to rowing and the fleet levy, or through Rōþin, an older name for the Swedish coastal region of Roslagen.
The two original centres of the Rus were Ladoga, known to the Norsemen as Aldeigja and founded in the mid-8th century, and Rurikovo Gorodische, likely called Holmr and founded in the mid-9th century. They sat at opposite ends of the Volkhov River, which runs 200 kilometres between Lake Ilmen and Lake Ladoga.
Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a Muslim diplomat who visited Volga Bulgaria in 922, described the Rus as tall as date palms, blond and ruddy. He wrote that each man carried an axe, a sword, and a knife at all times, and that the women wore neck-rings of gold and silver and prized green glass beads.
The Rus elite became bilingual around 950, but Old East Slavic only became their native language by the end of the 11th century. The scholar Melnikova concludes that the Slavicisation of the Rus elite would have been complete after the second half of the 11th century.
The Normanist view holds that the founders of the Rus were ethnically Scandinavian Varangians. It was proposed by German historian Gerhardt Friedrich Müller before the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1749, and by the end of that century it represented the consensus in Russian historiography.
The Rus ultimately gave their name to Russia and Belarus, and they are relevant to the national histories of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. The name is also preserved in many place names in the Novgorod and Pskov districts and is the origin of the Greek Rōs.