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 • Sep. 9, 2025

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 • Jul. 29, 2023

The models for the Ukrainian Cossacks in one of his most famous paintings, “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks,” were friends and academics from the university in St. Petersburg.

From Washington Post • Dec. 8, 2022

Yellow trams ding through narrow streets lined with the history of one occupation after another, from the Cossacks to the Swedes to the Germans and the Soviet Union.

From Seattle Times • Mar. 19, 2022

Cavalry soldiers, ninety-seven Cheyenne, Kiowa, Pawnee, and Sioux Indians, another fifty Cossacks and Hussars, 180 horses, eighteen buffalo, ten elk, ten mules, and a dozen other animals.

From "The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson