Russian-Ukrainian War (2014 ‒)
As a military journalist, photographer and writer, he has been covering the war in eastern Ukraine since 2014. He made a series of reports from Donbass as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Sergei Loiko became the only foreign correspondent to visit the Donetsk airport besieged by Russian militants. At the end of October 2014, he spent four days there among the Ukrainian military and volunteers from the Right Sector, which resulted in an article with a gallery of his own photos on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.[4][5]
Serhiy Loyko's report on October 29 on Echo of Moscow radio about the fighting around Donetsk airport was considered by Roskomnadzor to justify the practice of war crimes and contradict the Federal Law of July 25, 2002 № 114-FZ "On Countering Extremist Activities." The publication and the Echo of Moscow radio channel, as well as their founder, were warned about the inadmissibility of violating the legislation of the Russian Federation, and a transcript of the interview was immediately removed from the Echo of Moscow website.[6][7] However, the leaders of "Echo of Moscow" said that they would seek to lift the warning in court.[6][8]
Serhiy Loyko's materials, shot by him for the Los Angeles Times, received additional publicity due to the fact that his producer Victoria Butenko was nominated for an Emmy Award for a story about the Maidan.[9]
On September 3, 2015, a presentation of Serhiy Loyko's book "Airport" took place in Kyiv. According to the author, he wrote the book about the war between Russia and Ukraine, as "it can not be called otherwise." The author said that he was obsessed with the novel during his stay with the "cyborgs" at the Donetsk airport in October 2014. "From the very beginning, I realized that this must be a novel, because in the chronicle, in the documentary evidence, it is impossible to express the full depth of the tragedy, meanness, heroism, hatred, passion inherent in this war. I could not talk about it in a cold, detached tone of a chronicler, "Loiko wrote in his blog in the publication" New Time ".[10]
On March 15, 2018, the premiere of Serhiy Loyko's television documentary four-episode series "Hybrid History" about the events of recent years in eastern Ukraine took place on the Pryamiy channel.
On April 2, 2019, on the Russian propaganda TV show "Meeting Place", Serhiy Loiko gave a speech in defense of Euromaidan. After the speech, Russian propagandist and host Andrei Norkin disappeared from the studio. As it became known later, the propagandist had a hypertensive crisis and was in hospital at the time of his death.[11]
On March 11, 2022, in a video recorded during the Ukrainian-Russian War, Loyko announced he was no longer a journalist and he had joined Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces.[12]
