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“The approach up until a couple years ago had been to clear them out, but it’s now no longer deniable that that doesn’t solve the problem,” he told the BBC.

Russia, they said, may believe it can sidestep the sanctions in a deniable way.

It is the most delicate of dances, rife with subtle signals, attacks and feints, and deniable action.

The thing is, reshuffles are always deniable — and put-off-able — until they are physically, publicly and provably under way.

"There is a lot of traffic on the surface and everything that happens under the surface is 'deniable.' The challenge for us is to monitor this volume of water."