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.

For weeks, there have been reports of Russian air, missile and drone strikes on power plants in every major Ukrainian city.

The false report that a Russian-fired rocket had landed in Poland, killing two civilians, came on a day when 100 Russian bombs, rockets, missiles and drones hit “infrastructure” targets across Ukraine.

It was the heaviest Russian barrage to date in the nine-month war.

Putin’s goal: As the Ukrainian army battles the Russian army in the Donbas and Kherson, the power grid upon which the Ukrainian nation and people depend is to be systematically attacked, shut down, destroyed.

Without electric power, there will be no light or heat in Ukrainian homes, hospitals, offices or schools. Without electricity, food cannot be preserved, stoves do not work, water cannot be pumped.

Without power, light and heat, Putin’s expectation is that the Ukrainian people, who have patriotically supported their army, will, in the tens of thousands this winter, be at risk of freezing to death in the dark.

Winter, from mid-December to mid-March, is the coldest and darkest of the seasons, and it begins in four weeks.

On Friday, CNN reported that, after the latest wave of Russian strikes, 10 million Ukrainians, a fourth of the nation, were without power.

“Russia is turning winter into a weapon, even as its soldiers flail on the battlefield,” wrote The New York Times on Sunday. “In a relentless and intensifying barrage of missiles fired from ships at sea, batteries on land and planes in the sky, Moscow is destroying Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, depriving millions of heat, light and clean water.”

Ukraine’s state energy company adds: “Due to a dramatic drop in temperature, electricity consumption is increasing daily in those regions of Ukraine where power supply has already been restored after massive missile strikes on November 15 on the energy infrastructure.”

The U.S. stance in this war is that the fighting stops and peace talks begin only when Kyiv says the fighting stops and the negotiations begin.

But Americans, whose support for Ukraine has been indispensable in this war, also need to have a voice in when the war ends.

For us, the greatest stake in this Russia-Ukraine war is not who ends up in control of Luhansk, Donetsk or Kherson, but that we not be drawn into a military conflict that would put us on the escalator to a war with Russia, a world war and perhaps a nuclear war.

Nothing in Eastern or Central Europe is worth a major U.S. war with Russia that could go nuclear and cost millions of American lives.

The Donbas and Crimea may be of great importance to Kyiv and Moscow, but nothing in these lands would justify a U.S. war with a nuclear-armed Russia, the kind of war we managed to avoid through the Cold War from 1949-1989.

The recent incident of the S-300 surface-to-air missile misfired by Ukrainian forces, which landed several kilometers inside Poland, killing two Polish citizens, is a case in point.

Hawkish cries for NATO retaliation against Russia, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, revealed that America’s War Party is still very much with us and eager for the next confrontation with Putin’s Russia.

In the final days of this lame-duck Congress, before control of the House passes to Republicans in January, Democrats are expected to approve Joe Biden’s request for another $38 billion for the Kyiv regime, its army and its war. Passage of this legislation would virtually guarantee that the U.S. continues to finance this war and extend the fighting until spring.

Why would we do this?

The U.S. ought not dictate to Kyiv when it should move to the negotiating track to end this war. But we Americans do have, given our indispensable contributions to the Ukrainian war effort, the right to tell Kyiv when we believe that the risks of further fighting exceed any potential gain for us; and, if Kyiv is determined to fight on, to give notice that Ukraine will be doing so without any more U.S. munitions.

Great powers should never cede to lesser powers, unconnected to their vital interests, the capacity to drag them into unwanted wars.

The Polish missile incident, and the noisy clamor that arose for retaliation against Russia for hitting a NATO country, exposed the risks inherent in our many treaty commitments, where we are obliged to go to war for scores of nations, most of which are not remotely related to the security or vital interests of the United States.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”

“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.”

Assume, for the sake of argument, a GOP capture of the House of Representatives and of a majority of the U.S. Senate.

How would Biden describe that GOP victory, if he has persisted in his stated belief that the fate of “democracy” itself was on the table? Would he say that “democracy” had been rejected in America, dealt a crippling blow, a “shellacking,” by a party dominated by semi-fascists?

How does Biden then work for the next two years with leaders of a party whose ascendancy James Clyburn, third-ranking Democrat in the House, has just compared to the Nazis coming to power in Germany?

If you have equated your rising Republican rivals across the aisle in the early 2020s with the ascendant Nazis in the early 1930s, how do you work together with such as these on a common agenda?

What do liberal Democrats do, if, in a free and fair election, U.S. voters throw them out and replace them with people our elites routinely equate with fascists and Nazis?

We may be about to find out.

Indeed, if Trump Republicans are what the Democratic leaders say they are, and the country still votes them into office, what would that tell us about the character of the American electorate and American people?

Prediction: Democrats, if defeated Tuesday, will find a way to work with the victorious Republicans. Why? Because they do not truly believe in the names they have been calling Republicans, and because they lack the courage and conviction to rise up and rout genuine Nazis, if they should one day confront them.

Which brings us to what the election is really all about: the failure of a regime, and of the president, party and philosophy steering that regime.

In a republic such as ours, the government has many major duties.

High among them are resisting foreign invasions, securing the nation’s borders, protecting the value of the currency and securing the rights of citizens, first and foremost, the right to be free from domestic violence.

The Democratic Party that controls both houses of the Congress and the presidency has abjectly failed in all of these fundamental duties.

Consider.

In Biden’s 22 months in office, the U.S. has witnessed an invasion across its 1,900-mile southern border by millions of illegal aliens. Another million illegals have entered our country while effectively evading contact with U.S. authorities. These are the “gotaways.”

We do not know who these people are, where they came from and why, or where they are now, except to say that they have broken our laws and broken into our national home and are living here among us.

Some 250,000 migrants are now arriving at the border every month, irretrievably altering the character and composition of our country over the enraged protests of its citizens.

The president is thus failing abysmally in one of his foremost duties — to secure our borders. And neither Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris has shown the least interest in protecting that bleeding border, or even visiting it.

As for protecting the value of the U.S. dollars that constitute the wages, salaries and savings of our people, that value has been eaten up for a year by a cancerous 8% inflation that began soon after Biden began to implement his policies.

As for protecting the rights of citizens of this republic to be free from domestic violence, the Biden years have been witness to a pandemic of murders, rapes, robberies and assaults. Media reports and videos of the new savagery in our society have converted “crime” into one of the primary national concerns in a nation we used to call “God’s Country.”

This, then, is what Tuesday’s election is really all about.

“Democracy” is not on the ballot. What is on the ballot is a huge slice of the leadership and ruling class of the national Democratic Party, which is not the same thing. What is being decided by the ballots this election season is the verdict of the nation on a president who has failed, a party that has failed, and a political philosophy that has failed.

Democracy has not failed America. The reigning Democrats have failed America. And their desperate leaders are urging us to equate their party’s defeat and repudiation with a rejection of our political system.

If we lose the election to these Republicans, Democratic leaders have been telling America, it is because the American people preferred fascism to democracy.

This is the Big Lie of 2022.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”

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.

Through the 19th and almost all of the 20th century, Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire or the USSR, ruled from Moscow. And that condition presented no issue of concern to the USA, 5,000 miles away.

For us, the crucial concern in this Ukraine-Russia war is not who ends up in control of Crimea and the Donbas, but that the U.S. not be sucked into a war with Russia that could escalate into a world war and a nuclear war.

That is America’s paramount interest in this crisis.

Nothing in Eastern Europe would justify an all-out U.S. war with Russia. After all, Moscow’s control of Eastern and Central Europe was the situation that existed throughout the Cold War from 1945 to 1989.

And the U.S. never militarily challenged that result of World War II.

We lived with it. When Hungarians rose up in 1956 for freedom and independence, the U.S. refused to intervene. Rather than risk war with Russia, the Hungarian patriots were left to their fate by President Dwight Eisenhower.

How the world has changed in the 21st century.

Today, while the U.S. is under no obligation to go to war for Ukraine, we are obliged, under the NATO treaty, to go to war if Slovakia, Czechia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia are attacked.

And, though Kyiv is not a member of NATO, the U.S. finds itself the financier and principal armorer of Ukraine in a war with Russia over Crimea and the Donbas, which could involve the use of nuclear weapons for the first time since Nagasaki.

In short, our vital interest — avoidance of a U.S. war with a nuclear-armed Russia — may soon clash with the strategic war goals of Ukraine — i.e., full retrieval of Crimea and the Donbas.

If Putin is serious about an indefinite war to hold Crimea and the Donbas as Russian territory, how far are we willing to go to aid Ukraine in driving the Russians out and taking these lands back?

What appears to be emerging is a situation something like this:

As U.S. weapons help drive Russian soldiers out of the occupied regions of Ukraine, Russia and Putin are being driven into a corner, where the alternatives left to them shrink to two: accept defeat, humiliation and all its consequences, or escalate to hold onto what they have.

At some point, escalation to prevent defeat can require crossing the nuclear threshold. And Putin and his retinue have said as much.

Bottom line: At some point in this conflict, achieving the war aims of Ukraine must force Moscow to consider escalation or accept defeat.

For Russia, the worse the war situation is, the sooner comes the day when Putin must either play his ace of spades to avoid defeat, or accept defeat, humiliation and his potential overthrow in Moscow.

As Russia’s use of nuclear weapons could lead to a war that could involve the United States, Kyiv’s relentless pursuit of its vital interests — retrieval of all the lands taken by Russia, including the Donbas and Crimea — will eventually imperil vital U.S. interests.

If Kyiv, with U.S. weapons and support, pushes the Russians out of Crimea and the Donbas, Kyiv pushes its war with Russia closer and closer to a nuclear war.

As Kyiv seeks to reconquer all its territory lost to Russia since 2014, it pushes Russia closer and closer toward consideration of the only way to avert defeat and national humiliation, use of tactical nuclear weapons, which means moving closer to war with the United States.

The higher the casualty rates for Putin’s Russia, the worse the defeats inflicted on Russia by U.S.-armed and -equipped Ukrainians, the greater the likelihood Russia plays its ace of spades, nuclear weapons, to stave off defeat and humiliation and ensure the survival of the regime.

In short, the closer Putin comes to defeat, the closer we come to nuclear war, for that increasingly appears to be the only way Putin can prevent a Russian defeat, disgrace and humiliation.

Americans had best begin to consider what is the outcome to this war that can end the bloodshed, restore much of Ukraine to Kyiv, but not be seen as a historic humiliation for Russia.

Some Americans see this war as an opportunity to inflict a defeat and disgrace on Putin’s regime and Russia. Those seeking such goals should recognize that the closer they come to achieving their goals, the closer we come to Russia’s use of nuclear weapons.

Recall: President John F. Kennedy sought to provide an honorable way out of the Cuban missile crisis for the Soviet dictator and nation who precipitated it.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”

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.”

He suggested that those means included nuclear weapons, for which the Americans “created a precedent” at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Reading Putin’s excoriation, it is hard to recall, in four decades of Cold War, or the three decades since, a speech of such relentless vitriol and hostility toward the West.

Beyond the rhetoric, though, what does this tell us about Putin’s policy?

Putin is drawing a red line at Russia’s annexation and absorption of the four occupied oblasts in the south and east of Ukraine, roughly 15% of that country, and declaring it to be sacred Russian soil.

He intends to conscript and commit thousands of fresh troops to defend these new Russian territories. He will not rule out the use of nuclear weapons to repel any who attack and attempt to detach these new lands from Mother Russia. While open to negotiations, he will fight it out on this line if it takes all winter.

This leaves Ukraine, NATO and the U.S. with some difficult calculations and hard decisions.

Are they willing to engage the Russian army in the four oblasts to drive them out, if the Russians, rather than quit these territories, use a tactical nuclear weapon to repel the attacking Ukrainians?

After Putin’s speech, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked for the accelerated admission of Ukraine to the NATO alliance.

Were such an accession process to be expedited and Ukraine admitted to NATO, the U.S. would be obligated under Article 5 to go to war against Russia in Ukraine, on Kyiv’s side.

This could mean a U.S.-Russia war, which could escalate to World War III and nuclear war, and was something that every U.S. president from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan saw as his highest priority to avoid.

Fortunately, membership in NATO, and extension of an Article 5 war guarantee for the new member, requires a unanimous vote of all 30 member nations in the alliance.

And the requisite enthusiasm, inside NATO, to fight the world’s largest nuclear power over who rules Luhansk is nonexistent.

Which brings us to the sabotage of the Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II pipelines built to carry Russian natural gas across the Baltic Sea to Germany, and from there on to Central and Western Europe.

Late last month, explosions blew holes in both pipelines, preventing any renewal of Russian gas exports to Germany through the pipelines, even if Moscow decided to turn on the taps.

NATO Europe is blaming the Russians for blowing up their own pipelines. But these pipelines are a strategic asset that gives Moscow leverage over the economies of much of NATO Europe.

Putin blames the Americans and Brits for the sabotage and has called for the UN Security Council to investigate the act of “terrorism.”

Said Putin, “The sanctions were not enough for the Anglo-Saxons: They moved onto sabotage.”

But, again, though Europeans are pointing the finger at Moscow, why would Russia sabotage two pipelines it helped to construct, which give it lasting leverage over the prosperity of NATO Europe?

Why would Putin sabotage his own strategic assets?

What sense would that make?

As of today, the respective goals of the principal participants in the Ukraine war are becoming as clear as they are irreconcilable.

Putin has annexed and seeks to hold Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, attach them to Crimea, declare victory, and end a war he is not winning. This weekend, Russian forces were driven out of the city of Lyman they captured in the early days of this war.

Zelenskyy wants to defeat the Russian invaders, drive them out of his country, humiliate Putin and achieve a victory for Ukraine that would put him in its history books as the Winston Churchill of his nation.

However, it appears today that Ukraine will not be allowed to achieve these goals by Putin’s regime, even if preventing it requires the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

And the Americans, what do they want?

Given the Russian losses of troops, tanks, aircraft, armor, artillery, along with the perception that Putin and the Russian army launched a war of aggression against a smaller power and were defeated, America, which provided the weaponry to produce this outcome, is already perceived as a winner.

America should be looking to ending this war before it expands into a nuclear war, which this country has sought to avoid since the atomic age began.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”

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.

In an 1815 letter to Thomas Jefferson, long after both men had served as president, John Adams wrote:

“As to the history of the Revolution, my Ideas may be peculiar, perhaps Singular. What do We mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.”

Adams was saying that America was conceived and, as an embryonic nation, grew within the hearts of the peoples of the 13 colonies, two to three decades before the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

In short, our country came to be before our republic came to be, and long before what we today call “our democracy” came to be. A country is different from, and more than, the political system that it adopts.

France was France all through the Bourbon dynasty, the Revolution of 1789, the creation of the First Republic, the Reign of Terror, Napoleon’s First Empire and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy — all the way to the creation of the Fifth Republic by President Charles de Gaulle.

And beneath the carapace of the USSR, the heart of Mother Russia continued to beat. Rightly, during the Cold War, we regarded Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria as “captive nations” and captive peoples.

The point: Neither the regime nor the political system imposed, nor some abstract idea, is the country that predates them and has first claim upon the loyalty of its sons and daughters.

In his famous toast, American naval hero Stephen Decatur declared: “Our country! … May she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!”

The crisis today for those who incessantly proclaim, “Our democracy is in danger,” is that millions of patriots are coming to see our incumbent regime, “our democracy,” as faithless and failing in its foremost duty — to protect and defend our country and countrymen from enemies foreign and domestic.

Forced constantly by the establishment to choose between them, patriotic Americans may one day come to choose, as did their fathers, the country they love over the crown that rules them.

Consider.

The Biden regime that currently rules us has allowed 3 million migrants to invade our country in two years. These illegals continue to break our laws and cross our border at a rate of 250,000 a month.

Among them are terrorists, robbers, rapists, murderers, cartelists and child molesters. The Biden regime has abdicated its duty to halt the invasion that is changing the ethnic, racial, religious, social and political character and composition of our American family without the consent of the American people, into whose national home these intruders are breaking with impunity.

President Joe Biden is assuring that the future of the nation will be determined by millions of people who have in common only that they broke our laws to get into our country. Vice President Kamala Harris smugly dismisses demands to address the crisis by saying America’s southern border is “secure.”

With this invasion has come a flood of the narcotic fentanyl, which last year took the lives of 100,000 Americans, a number equal to all the U.S. war dead in years of fighting in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Under the Biden party’s policy of softness on crime and indulgence of the criminal class, assaults, robberies, carjackings and “mass shootings,” where four victims are killed or wounded in each episode, have surged in U.S. cities.

With America’s currency and economy in his custody, Biden has, in 18 months, run up inflation, that cancer of America’s currency, to 8%, run up the national debt to where it far exceeds the gross national product, and crashed the stock market, wiping out trillions in wealth.

“The pandemic is over,” Biden told “60 Minutes” in September, a month when more than 400 Americans were dying of COVID-19 every day, a death rate higher than World War II and equal to the bloodiest war in U.S. history, the Civil War of 1861-1865.

The custodians of “our democracy” are failing in the most fundamental of duties of any political system — to protect and defend the people. No failed regime can justify its permanence by claiming some inherent superiority.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”