Heill Konráð!

Fascinating stuff! This is area spoken of in Old Icelandic sources
generally as 'austrvegr' "east-way". There's a curious, and possibly
early, saga which deals entirely with late Viking Age adventures in
the East: Yngvars saga víðförla; the expedition it purports to tell of
did take place, and is commemorated in tens of surviving runestones in
Sweden, although the story has been turned into a folktale and then
adapted further into a Christian morality tale only remotely connected
with historical events. A number of runic inscriptions have come to
light in the region, including one particularly intriguing 'helmingr'
(half-stanza) of skaldic verse from Staraya (=Old) Ladoga.

http://www.arild-hauge.com/ru-e-rusland.htm
http://www.arild-hauge.com/ru-n-rusland.htm

I wonder if there's a clearer photograph of this anywhere online.

Besides Old Norse runes from the eastern routes (and the one much
earlier possible East Germanic inscription on the Kovel spearhead),
one of the Rus centres, Novgorod, is famous for its Slavic birch-bark
letters, discovered in recent decades, and dating from the 11th to the
15th century. These offer an important glimpse of an East Slavic
vernacular, distinct from the South Slavic based Church Slavonic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Novgorod_dialect

Imagine if a similar trove of Gothic writings turned up! Not likely
perhaps, but you never know. It's only relatively recently that the
Novgorod birch-bark letters have been found. The other potential point
of contact between Norse travellers and Goths would have been the
Crimean peninsula (the Byzantine 'theme' of Gothia), at the southern
end of the Dniepr trade-route, where we have evidence for the survival
of the language into early modern times.

And speaking of the Varangians, I came across this article a while ago
about English refugees who became mercenaries in the Varangian Guard
following the Norman Conquest of 1066.

http://www.deremilitari.org/resources/articles/pappas1.htm

Llama Nom