The paper offers a concise description of Russian discourse elements extracted from the SibLing Corpus of Russian Dialogue Speech. Only vocalizations that have no lexical meaning and function as backchannel cues are considered. The approaches to analysis embrace establishing their occurrence frequency, sound quality, and prosodic features with the help of computer acoustic tools. Russian backchannel vocalizations are shown to be of two recurrent types and to contain sounds outside the phoneme inventory of the Russian language. They are typically pronounced with a rising tone and are easily recognized by Russian speakers as backchannel responses even out of context. Certain discourse markers that are used by the speaker and seem to trigger backchannel vocalizations from the listener have been observed. The findings lead to the conclusion that Russian dialogue discourse is strictly organized and systematic. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025.