Cossacks

Cultural  

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.

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Example Sentences

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

From BBC

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.

From BBC

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.

From New York Times

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.

From Salon

And now it helps define the contours of battle — as it has for millenniums, a barrier and a conduit to warring Scythians, Greeks, Vikings, Huns, Cossacks, Russians, Germans and many more.

From New York Times