Venedi empire

The Venedi were a pre-Slavic people who lived in modern Russia and Ukraine around classical antiquity.

What would it for this obscure tribe far beyond lands treaded by Greeks or Roman armies to form an empire roughly equalling Russia in the 16th or 15th centuries AD?
 
Presumably it involves becoming a steppe empire, displacing the Scythians and Sarmatians, and forming something akin to the Turkish khaganates of the era.

But I highly doubt they could gather the strength to make something as big as early modern Russia.
 
The Venedi were a pre-Slavic people who lived in modern Russia and Ukraine around classical antiquity.
The Venedi were presumably a pre-Slavic people.
The origin of the Slavs is a very complicated and controversial issue, no certainty here.

What would it for this obscure tribe far beyond lands treaded by Greeks or Roman armies to form an empire roughly equalling Russia in the 16th or 15th centuries AD?
If that had been a Slav tribe (or tribes), first they would have had to be dominated by some other ethnic group like a Steppe one, a Germanic tribe or some other.
In OTL the early Slavs had serious problems with forming a big entity; they usually needed other ethnic element to get consolidated, unified into a big enough polity.

And then there might have been some 'empire' like that (or slightly to the North-East):

East_Europe_Archaeological_Kievan-Chernyakhov.jpg
 
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