Reading and writing Russian both start with Cyrillic literacy — and handwriting introduces a genuine surprise for many learners: Russian cursive letterforms often look quite different from their printed counterparts.
While English cursive and print letters are usually recognizable variations of each other, several Russian cursive letters look substantially different from their printed forms — enough that beginners sometimes can't immediately connect a handwritten word to the printed letters they've studied. This is worth knowing early so it doesn't feel like an entirely separate alphabet to learn.
Russian reads left to right, so the reading direction itself is already familiar — the real early task is Cyrillic letter recognition, including the letters that share shapes with Latin letters but represent different sounds (see Russian Alphabet).
In several cases, yes — some Russian cursive letters look substantially different from their printed forms, more so than the print/cursive difference in English, which surprises many beginners.
Yes — the reading direction is the same as English; the main new skill is Cyrillic letter recognition.
Learning print letterforms solidly first, then introducing cursive separately, tends to avoid confusion, especially given how different some cursive letters look from print.
Yes, following the same lesson approach used for Arabic and Latvian reading practice.
See also: Russian Alphabet · Russian Pronunciation · Learn Russian