CNN’s Jim Sciutto Asks Biden State Dept. Spox ‘Why Won’t the U.S. Shoot Down the Planes That Are Bombing Hospitals?’

CNN anchor Jim Sciutto asked Biden State Department Spokesperson Ned Price to explain why the U.S. won’t “shoot down” Russian planes that are carrying out attacks on civilian targets like hospitals.

During a joint press conference with President Andrzej Duda of Poland on Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris referred to Russian military strikes on civilian targets like hospitals as”atrocities of unimaginable proportion,” and promised the U.S. will support war crimes investigations.

On CNN Newsroom With Poppy Harlow and Jim Sciutto shortly thereafter, Sciutto asked Price about the veep’s comment, asking the by-now well-worn question of whether those attacks “are war crimes.”

Price echoed the VP, saying that “we’re working with the international community, each group to create new mechanisms to ensure that we are holding Russia and will hold Russia accountable for any potential war crimes.”

Sciutto then asked why the U.S. doesn’t “shoot down” Russian planes:

MR. SCIUTTO: OK, hold them accountable, but not stop them because they’re continuing here. Why won’t the US shoot down the planes that are bombing hospitals?

MR. PRICE: Well, Jim, we are providing our Ukrainian partners with what they need to engage in self-defense. And you have seen the effectiveness of that strategy. The Russian war effort really has been stalled. President Putin has severely miscalculated if he thought he would roll into Ukraine, not find any resistance. Clearly, he was wrong. We have seen convoys stuck. We’ve seen Russians engaged and stopped really in a morass of their own making.

And we’ve done that by providing over the course of the past year, as you heard from the vice president, more than a billion dollars in defense of security assistance, more than two hundred and fifty million dollars in security assistance over the past week alone. And by working with Congress, we’re grateful for Congress’s cooperation. We’ll be able to provide more than $13 billion to our Ukrainian partners, about half of which will be in the form of security assistance.

Sciutto went on to ask if, by taking options off the table, President Joe Biden is “in effect giving the Kremlin a veto, veto power over U.S. military options here?”

“Jim, we’ve heard a lot of rhetoric from Moscow. I wouldn’t put stock in Moscow’s rhetoric,” Price said.

Watch above via CNN.