Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Season" in English language version.
Witte wanted the main base of the Russian Navy to be situated at a location where waters were ice-free the whole year round [...].
The warriors are farmers and the farmers are warriors, so you have to time your war in relation to the harvest and to other agricultural events. [...] Spring and autumn marked the beginning and end of the campaign season, and the rest of the year was closed for war.
Although these distances seem counterintuitive to residents of the Northern Hemisphere who experience summer in July and winter in January — the seasons are not nearly as greatly affected by distance as they are by changes in solar illumination caused by the fact that Earth's polar axis is inclined 23.5 degrees from the perpendicular to the ecliptic (the plane of the solar system through or near which most of the planet's orbits travel) and because the Earth exhibits parallelism (currently toward Polaris, the North Star) as it revolves about the Sun.