The paper considers the assessment of isolated dynamics of universities participating in project 5 in 100 and other Russian universities promotion in the main international university rankings over the last five years. Using gradient boosting method and Shapley’s additive explanations features with the biggest impact on the position of Russian universities in the international rankings were selected. Clustering was carried out on the basis of selected features, in which the observation was a Russian university that was included minimum in one international university ranking separately in each year. Two interpretable clusters were obtained as a result, which was used to analyze the movement of universities between clusters.