TODAY: Anti-corruption head accused of plagiarism; sources respond to news of RIA Novosti’s imminent demise; hasty budget forecasts risk reserves, says IMF; Medvedev continues South Stream row; Yanukovych won’t budge on Russia; Sochi to have protest zones.

Oleg Plokhoi, the head of the Kremlin’s brand new anti-corruption group, stands accused of plagiarism and of cheating on his doctoral thesis.  Various sources have responded with concern to President Vladimir Putin’s announcement that top news agency RIA Novosti will be dissolved and ‘militant anti-Westerner’ Dmitry Kiselyov will oversee its replacement organ.  Kiselyov has promised that the staff of the outgoing agency will remain ‘in demand’.  The Wall Street Journal says the new news agency, Russia Today, will join Itar-Tass ‘in promoting the glories of the Putin government’.  Despite (or indeed, because of) the news, which ‘stunned even the agency’s own staff’, RIA Novosti will fulfil its Olympic reporting obligations.  RIA Novosti’s Editor-in-Chief, Svetlana Mironyuk, pointed out that the Kremlin will be throwing away the fortune it spent building the news agency. ‘А whole new media industry could have been created in Russia with the $1 billion RIA Novosti spent in the last decade,’ writes Leonid Bershidsky.  ‘But RIA’s closure isn’t about money,’ says Marc Champion.  The news consolidates Putin’s growing status ‘on the world stage as a king of media anti-hero’.