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Good morning.

Meetings with spies, jihaddies, drug dealers and refugees.

What a year for our correspondence, with one encountering a Swedish troll.

Today we're reflecting on Columbia's long affair with cocaine.

We revisit the story of an unlikely jihadi from Kosovo who lasted just five days in

Syria and here again from a group of guys partying but in a refugee camp in Bangladesh home home to hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas.

There's been no shortage of stories about Russia getting up to no good in the West in 2018. Few European elections have passed without allegations

of meddling by Moscow, and more details of suspected interference in Donald Trump's rise to the presidency have emerged.

Then there were the four Russian men Dutch authorities claimed to have caught trying to hack into the world's chemical weapons watchdog, and the poisoning of the Scripples,

carried out, say Britain and its allies by Russian agents.

Earlier this year, Steve Rosenberg travelled to Karabash, more than a day's drive east of Moscow,

but even there and then Russia's relationship with the West loomed large.

The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin loved winter. He once wrote,

The snow below the bluish skies, like a majestic carpet lies.

Each year for a few gloriously glacial months,

Winter's majestic carpet hides the harshness of Russia.

Industrial wastelands, desolate landscapes, all are transformed

into fairy tale worlds that seem sprinkled with icing sugar. It's the same with carabash. In the Russian winter this

Rust Belt town is a site to behold. Towering above me are the smoke-spewing chimneys

of the local copperworks.

Next to the smelting plant is a frozen lake,

...