Short answers, pulled from the story.
Soyuz is a family of Soviet and later Russian expendable medium-lift launch vehicles that holds the record for the most launches in the history of spaceflight. Developed initially by the OKB-1 design bureau and manufactured by the Progress Rocket Space Centre in Samara, Russia, the family has accumulated more than 1,700 flights. Most Soyuz rockets descend from the R-7 Semyorka, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile.
The first Soyuz launcher was introduced in 1966. Its first four test flights ended in failure, but subsequent missions achieved success. The Soyuz-U variant, the single most launched carrier rocket ever built, had its maiden flight on the 18th of May 1973.
After the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet in 2011, the United States had no domestic vehicle capable of carrying astronauts to orbit, making NASA fully dependent on Soyuz until 2020. NASA resumed crewed launches from American soil in 2020 through the Commercial Crew Development program, when SpaceX's Crew Dragon completed its first crewed flight.
On the 11th of October 2018, the Soyuz MS-10 mission failed to reach orbit after an issue with the main booster. Four payload-mounted solid rocket jettison motors pulled the Soyuz spacecraft away from the malfunctioning rocket, and the two crew members, Aleksey Ovchinin and Nick Hague, followed a ballistic trajectory and landed safely more than 400 km downrange from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
All Soyuz variants use RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen as propellants, with one exception: the Soyuz-U2 used Syntin, a refined kerosene variant, combined with liquid oxygen. The Soyuz-U2 flew between the 23rd of December 1982 and the 3rd of September 1995.
Soyuz rockets are assembled horizontally in the Assembly and Testing Building, transported to the launch pad in that horizontal position, and then raised upright. At launch, electrically initiated pyrotechnic flares mounted on birch poles ignite the propellants at approximately T-20 seconds before engine start. After liftoff, the four strap-on boosters fall away cleanly, forming a visible pattern in the sky known as the Korolev cross.