Cossacks

1. A people in southern Russia who became aggressive warriors during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In place of taxes, they supplied the Russian Empire with scouts and mounted soldiers. The Cossacks are also famed for their dances, which feature fast-paced music and seemingly impossible leaps.

Example Sentences

His family are Ukrainian Cossacks – a group renowned as warriors and pioneers of independence in Ukraine.

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He continues in the same vein: “If we have an order to move forward, we can get to Moscow - and we'll show what Ukraine means and what are our guys are like - real Cossacks.”

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Mr Suny points out that the inhabitants of these lands when they were conquered by Russia were neither Russian nor Ukrainian, but Ottoman, Tatar or Cossacks - Slavic peasants who had fled to the frontiers.

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More recently, say, 500 years ago, it became a fortress for the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, a military community from the eastern European steppes that played a prominent role in building a Ukrainian state.

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Ukrainians learned that the hard way in the mid-1600s when Ukrainian Cossacks rebelled against their Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth rulers and established an independent state, seeking protection from their Orthodox co-religionists in Muscovy.

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