AP fires reporter behind retracted ‘Russian missiles’ story

Seems wild how it seems lately there&#x27;s no room for gray, only black and white.<p>I got torn apart for saying the &quot;ghost of Kyiv&quot; wasn&#x27;t real, followed by the &quot;most level headed take&quot; of a reply that went something like &quot;hey, even if its fake, people need something to believe in right now so saying this stuff only helps Russia.&quot;<p>I am of course 100% against what Russia is doing. I just feel like we should all be very aware of what is real and what is fake. Otherwise we can&#x27;t make good judgments.<p>I saw people calling for WWIII because of the missile incident. Just blows my mind. I truly think that some people feel so insulated from the effects they view it as some &quot;event&quot; that just takes place in a distant land where if you cheer loud enough and show enough support the &quot;good guys will win&quot; after a few months. The world doesn&#x27;t need more destabilization. Of course, Russia can&#x27;t keep killing people either... but at the end of the day, this isn&#x27;t and shouldn&#x27;t be solved by online commentators.<p>I really wish Putin would throw in the towel at this point... its barbaric, depressing and embarrassing.

It&#x27;s amazing how quickly fake news is able to spread through &quot;credible&quot; news sources, all without even the slightest bit of real verification. I don&#x27;t know if its scary or comforting to consider that if the political establishment wanted WW3, they could have it had it right there. The same intelligence agencies that convinced the world Iraq had WMD could have simply agreed with the story&#x2F;Zelensky&#x2F;et al, declare anybody debating it to be a &quot;conspiracy theorist promoting Russian misinformation&#x2F;propaganda&quot;, invoke article 5, and away we go.

Getting fired for almost starting WW3 due to a fake story you wrote seems like a pretty light punishment. Maybe the AP will do a better job fact checking in the future before causing a war.

<i>subsequent reporting showed that the missiles were Russian-made and most likely fired by Ukraine in defense against a Russian attack</i><p>They were fired by Ukraine towards <i>Poland</i> in defense?

I’m glad cooler heads prevailed. A lesson for the rest of us to wait for facts and stop being outraged by everything the press throws at us.<p>That being said, Russia still is shit; and we wouldn’t be in this situation if they weren’t attacking civilian infrastructure in an attempt to freeze Ukrainians to death.

When Ukraine hits Poland (even by mistake), people take step back and blame Russia, because Ukraine wouldn&#x27;t have had to use an anti-missile system if there was no Russian missile in the first place. Fair enough.<p>Now, why don&#x27;t people use the same analogy for Russia starting that war? Let&#x27;s take a step back and ask a basic question - who escalated this all? Who benefits from this war? Who pours money there? Why is nobody asking these questions?