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Los Angeles Times Moscow correspondent to be adviser to Ukraine’s minister of information

Earlier, Sergei Loiko turned down an invitation to take the post of deputy minister of information policy, saying he had a binding contract with the editorial desk

KIEV, December 15. /TASS/. Sergei Loiko, a Los Angeles Times correspondent in Moscow, will be hired are as adviser to Ukraine’s minister of information policy, Minister Yuri Stets said on Monday.

Earlier, Loiko turned down an invitation to take the post of deputy minister of information policy, saying he had a binding contract with the editorial desk.

Loiko is working with the Los Angeles Times Moscow bureau and collaborates with Russia’s Novaya Gazeta daily and the Ekho Moskvy radio station. As a military reporter, he worked in Afghanistan, Iraq and other hotbeds of tension. After his story about the developments in Ukraine on Ekho Moskvy, Russia’s oversight authority in the sphere of the mass media /Roskomnadzor/ issued a warning to the radio station saying his story contained information justifying war crimes.

The ministry of information policy, dubbed the “ministry of truth” after George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, was established by the Ukrainian government in early December. It was tasked to ensure the implementation of the information security programme. Apart from that, it will forge Ukraine’s image and take measures to “prevent external influence on the domestic information space.”

After his appointment as Ukraine’s minister of information policy, Yuri Stets said the ministry was only established for a period of combat operations in the country. He said there were three basic functions of his ministry, namely to develop the information strategy, work out measures to ensure information security that had been committed in the coalition agreement, and to help other government structures withstand foreign propaganda not only in the areas controlled by “separatists,” but also in the entire country and outside it.

He also reportedly said he was ready to give the idea of such ministry if there were reasons why it was unnecessary.