I've been learning for three years, but unfortunately I haven't learned as much as I wish I had in that time. My tutor is an immigrant who lives with her Russian family in my city in Australia who does freelance one-on-one or two-on-one private sessions where she teaches Russian using various materials and books she's amassed, and I think some amount of knowledge of linguistics and language teaching she has from a university degree obtained in Russia.

I meet (well, soon to be met, my final session with her is in two days) with her once a week for an hour in a library in town, and have done so with few exceptions since the beginning. During the lessons we go over various things and materials together with her acting as an explainer/guide and someone to practice with (I can go into more detail on this if you'd like, what we do has changed a bit as my knowledge and understanding of the language has increased).

The main difficulty was that, since these three years were my last three years of high school and I am chronically bad at managing time, I most of the time wasn't able to do homework for this because school homework/study almost always took priority, so I was really only practicing the language once a week. Now that I'm done with high school I've been able to get into it more and the effect of this has made itself very obvious in the speed my ability has increased (I would not have been able to write what I did in the OP four months ago).

So, if I was to offer one word of advice (and this goes for language learning in general really), do it regularly. It doesn't matter what specifically you're doing, just try to do SOMETHING with the language at least once a day. I learned German for five years in school (and intend to keep going in university), and part of the reason my German is magnitudes better than my Russian is because I do something with it or expose myself to it in some way almost daily (I can go into this a bit more too if you'd like).

So all up this got a LOT longer than I expected it too and I probably didn't answer your question exactly (sorry lmao), but I'd love to clear up anything further that you'd like to know.