Winter has often proven an indispensable ally of Mother Russia.

The impending winter of 1812-13 forced Napoleon's withdrawal from Moscow, a retreat from which his Grande Armee never recovered.

The winter of 1941-42 sealed the ultimate fate of the invading armies of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.

Vladimir Putin's new strategy in the war he launched on Ukraine in February is to conscript the coming winter of 2022-23 as an ally of his failing army.

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"Make no mistake -- democracy is on the ballot for us all."

So declaiming in his Union Station speech to the nation on the real stakes in the 2022 elections, President Joe Biden, who was immediately echoed by Barack Obama, painted himself and his party into a corner.

For if Trump Republicans carry the day Tuesday, Biden will have to declare, if there is any consistency left in him, a "defeat for democracy" and a victory for the party that he has said is steeped in "semi-fascism."

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To President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine, Crimea and the Donbas are national territories whose retrieval justifies all-out war to expel the invading armies of Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Yet, who controls Crimea and the Donbas has, in the history of U.S.-Russian relations, never been an issue to justify a war between us.

America has never had a vital interest in who rules in Kyiv.

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In a Kremlin speech last week, President Vladimir Putin identified Russia's real "enemy" in Ukraine as "the ruling circles of the so-called West" whose "hegemony has a pronounced character of totalitarianism, despotism and apartheid."

In the West, Putin declaimed, "The repression of freedom is taking on the outlines of a reverse religion, of real Satanism," which, on issues like gender identity, amounts to a "denial of man."

Putin then formally annexed the occupied Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and pledged to defend these new Russian territories with "all the forces and means at our disposal."

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Asked, "What is an American?" many would answer, "An American is a citizen of the United States."

Yet, at the First Continental Congress in 1774, 15 years before the U.S. became a nation of 13 states, Patrick Henry rose to proclaim that, "British oppression has effaced the boundaries of the several colonies; the distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American."

Henry was saying -- more than a dozen years before our constitutional republic was established -- that America already existed as a nation, and he was her loyal son.

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