Ukraine is located on the western steppes, but something most people don't know about Ukraine is that it's the home of the fabled Amazons. I believe that the Amazons were real people, but not as the Greeks portrayed them. All we know of them is based on stories brought back to Greece by sailors, traders, and Greek mercenaries.
I especially disagree with the man-hating part of the Greek legends of the Amazons. To the Greeks, the site of fierce female warriors was something they couldn't wrap their heads around. So in the mind of the male dominant Greeks, if women took up arms, it must be because they hated men. But I think there's a much more reasonable explanation: At some point, a tribe or a nation lost most of their men in some ferocious war on the steppes but managed to escape capture. In ancient times the steppes was a brutal place. If people could not defend themselves, they faced a bleak future. The most one could hope for was a swift death for men and women to be enslaved after watching their male children tortured and killed. So instead of accepting that fate, the women took the place of their dead husbands and became the warriors of the tribe not because they hated men but because they loved the ones they had left and wanted to protect them. We know from archaeological excavations of steppe burial mounds that female warriors we're not unusual, so the case of a tribe being composed of almost all female warriors is not beyond reason.
I especially disagree with the man-hating part of the Greek legends of the Amazons. To the Greeks, the site of fierce female warriors was something they couldn't wrap their heads around. So in the mind of the male dominant Greeks, if women took up arms, it must be because they hated men. But I think there's a much more reasonable explanation: At some point, a tribe or a nation lost most of their men in some ferocious war on the steppes but managed to escape capture. In ancient times the steppes was a brutal place. If people could not defend themselves, they faced a bleak future. The most one could hope for was a swift death for men and women to be enslaved after watching their male children tortured and killed. So instead of accepting that fate, the women took the place of their dead husbands and became the warriors of the tribe not because they hated men but because they loved the ones they had left and wanted to protect them. We know from archaeological excavations of steppe burial mounds that female warriors we're not unusual, so the case of a tribe being composed of almost all female warriors is not beyond reason.
