Results of the first experimental evaluation of machine learning models trained on Ru-RSTreebank – first Russian corpus annotated within RST framework – are presented. Various lexical, quantitative, morphological, and semantic features were used. In rhetorical relation classification, ensemble of CatBoost model with selected features and a linear SVM model provides the best score (macro F1 = 54.67 ± 0.38). We discover that most of the important features for rhetorical relation classification are related to discourse connectives derived from the connectives lexicon for Russian and from other sources.