Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Russian Ground Forces were established on the 7th of May 1992, when President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree forming the Russian Ministry of Defence and the other branches of the Russian Armed Forces. The force emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union, inheriting troops and equipment withdrawing from Eastern Europe.
Performance in the First Chechen War of 1994-96 has been assessed by a British academic as appallingly bad. The 131st Motor Rifle Brigade was virtually destroyed in Chechen ambushes during the push into Grozny. Analysts Dmitri Trenin and Aleksei Malashenko described the military's performance as grossly deficient at all levels, from commander-in-chief to the drafted private.
Corruption grew severely in the Russian Ground Forces following the Soviet collapse. A 1995 U.S. Foreign Military Studies Office report described the Armed Forces as an institution increasingly defined by high levels of criminality and corruption at every level. In July 2013, the Prosecutor General's office reported corruption had grown 5.5 times compared to the previous year, costing the Russian government 4.4 billion rubles.
Russia deployed approximately 150,000 soldiers around Ukraine in preparation for the invasion. Elements were drawn from multiple Combined Arms Armies, including the 29th, 35th, and 36th deployed to Belarus, and the 20th and 8th near the Ukrainian border. Russian troops began invading on the 24th of February 2022.
After 14 months of fighting, Russian forces were estimated to have lost over 2,000 tanks. Russia compensated by reactivating tanks from the 1950s and 1960s and using locally made equipment. Ukrainian Commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi reported on the 24th of July 2024 that after two and a half years, the Russian Army had doubled its operational tanks from 1,700 to 3,500.
Ground Forces Day is celebrated on the 1st of October. The date commemorates an edict by Tsar Ivan the Terrible on the 1st of October 1550 ordering the placement of a thousand servicemen in Moscow and surrounding districts, forming a local brigade of Streltsy. President Putin formally established the holiday by signing decree No. 549 on the 31st of May 2006.