I’ve said before that President Joe Biden can be feisty, something that one CBS News reporter found out for herself during a press briefing Thursday. Biden was in no mood for quibbling when reporter Christina Ruffini asked him about the U.S. not deterring Russian President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine, Mediaite reports.

The presser was held at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium and Ruffini was the last reporter to be called on to ask questions. Biden had already called an end to the news conference but then came back for one question and was well, a bit grouchy.

The president met earlier with leaders of other NATO countries, and Ruffini asked what he thinks might deter Putin from the course he’s on, considering the U.S. has yet to do so.

“Sir, deterrents did not work,” she said. “What makes you think Vladimir Putin will alter course based on the action you’ve taken today?”

Biden was not particularly happy with that line of question and responded:

“Let’s get something straight. You remember, if you covered me from the very beginning, I did not say in fact the sanctions would deter him. Sanctions never deter. You keep talking about that. Sanctions never deter.”

“The maintenance of sanctions, the maintenance of sanctions, the increasing the pain and the demonstration why I asked for this NATO meeting today is to be sure that after a month we will sustain what we’re doing, not just next month, the following month, but for the remainder of this entire year. That’s what will stop him.”

Ruffini asked another version of that question. And no, Biden was not happy.

“Do you believe the actions today will have an impact on Russia changing course in Ukraine?” she said.

Biden snapped back, saying “That’s not what I said. You’re playing a game with me … The answer’s no.”

He followed that up, saying:

“The single most important thing is for us to stay unified and the world continue to focus on what a brute this guy is and all the innocent people’s lives are being lost and ruined and what’s going on. That’s the important thing. But look, if you’re Putin and think that Europe is going to crack in a month or six weeks or two months, why not — they can take anything for another month. But we have to demonstrate. The reason I asked for the meeting. We have to stay fully, totally, thoroughly united.”

Al-Jazeera notes that the U.S., Canada, the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom have imposed a series of sanctions on Russia that mainly affect banks, oil refineries, and military exports.

But sanctions can be a double-edged sword. First of all, there are a variety of sanctions nations sometimes employ and I don’t really have the space to cover them all. And according to this article from The Brookings Institute, they need to be applied carefully.

“Sanctions are blunt instruments that often produce unintended and undesirable  consequences. Sanctions increased the economic distress on Haiti, triggering a dangerous and expensive exodus of people from Haiti to the United States. In the former Yugoslavia, the arms embargo weakened the Bosnian (Muslim) side given the fact that Bosnia’s Serbs and Croats had larger stores of military supplies and greater access to additional supplies from outside sources. Military sanctions against Pakistan increased its reliance on a nuclear option, both because the sanctions cut off Islamabad’s access to U.S. weaponry and by weakening the Pakistani confidence in American reliability.”

What’s also worrisome is that sanctions can actually do the opposite of what they are intended to do.

“More generally, sanctions can have the perverse effect of bolstering authoritarian, statist societies,” Brookings notes. “By creating scarcity, they enable governments to better control distribution of goods. The danger is both moral, in that innocents are affected, as well as practical, in that sanctions that harm the population at large can bring about undesired effects that include bolstering the regime, triggering large-scale emigration, and retarding the emergence of a middle-class and civil society. Smart or designer sanctions are at best a partial solution. Gathering the necessary the knowledge about assets, and then moving quickly enough to freeze them can often prove impossible.”

I’m sure that Biden and Putin are already well-aware of these facts, and quite obviously sanctions are often not the best solution.

No wonder Biden’s feeling grouchy.

WATCH:

WATCH: Joe Biden SNAPS at reporter's question about effectiveness of sanctions and deterrence on Putin

CBS's @EenaRuffini: “Sir deterrence didn’t work”

Biden: “Let’s get something straight. I did not say sanctions would deter him. Sanctions never deter…“ pic.twitter.com/RRh6sf4uSt

— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) March 24, 2022