How to Use deniable in a Sentence

deniable

adjective
  • The best way to describe them is a covert, deniable first-strike weapon.
    Fox News, 13 June 2019
  • Regardless of who was at fault, the impact was not deniable.
    Jeff Miller, Los Angeles Times, 30 Jan. 2022
  • This might take the form of a cyberattack or other deniable but dramatic action to send a message about their resolve over Syria and even the score.
    David Hambling, Popular Mechanics, 19 June 2017
  • The official said that Iran’s policy has been to conduct deniable attacks, a fiction that the United States would no longer allow.
    New York Times, 30 Dec. 2019
  • But since at least the 1990s, Moscow has used them as deniable proxies for its military interventions abroad.
    Owen Matthews, Newsweek, 17 Jan. 2018
  • The government would show up with nothing on paper about its plans, sticking instead to deniable verbal statements.
    The Economist, 29 Aug. 2019
  • The air attacks on Saudi oil facilities were more pointed — and perhaps more deniable.
    Los Angeles Times, 18 Sep. 2019
  • But well before then, the politics of self-presentation had coalesced around grander, less deniable hair.
    Wesley Morris, New York Times, 14 Oct. 2020
  • Russia has relied on informal and deniable military forces since the Stalin era.
    Andrei Soldatov, Foreign Affairs, 12 May 2023
  • At their subsequent trials some officials involved claimed that Reagan knew about the broad outline of the scheme, if not all its details, but at the time his involvement was entirely deniable.
    The Economist, 12 Dec. 2019
  • Given that Centcom already consumes most such resources, a good first step would be to improve management of its in-theater assets to prevent deniable attacks by Iran.
    Kathryn Wheelbarger and Dustin Walker, WSJ, 21 Dec. 2020
  • Which is why any new accords with Russia, to be truly effective, would have to embrace Russia’s turn toward deniable, hard-to-detect cyberweapons.
    New York Times, 24 Jan. 2022
  • Many experts believe Tehran is biding its time to plot deniable revenge attacks on US targets using regional terror groups.
    Stephen Collinson, CNN, 28 Feb. 2020
  • Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, has pointed to the example of the Wagner group, a mercenary force that serves as a deniable arm of Russian power in several warzones.
    The Economist, 15 Sep. 2020
  • The implied question: Which is worse, the blatantly, baroquely horrible, or the plausibly deniable?
    New York Times, 8 Oct. 2019
  • Instead, politicians preside over a system that uses plausibly deniable violence to maintain power and to keep perks flowing to a privileged few.
    Rachel Kleinfeld, WSJ, 9 Nov. 2018
  • How would a government or military react to an attack from a source that is autonomous, overwhelming in numbers, and completely deniable in terms of ownership?
    James Floyd Kelly, WIRED, 12 July 2012
  • Rather than declare open war on the international order, Russia was using digital means to undermine it with brazen but deniable acts of cyber sabotage.
    Andy Greenberg, Wired, 28 Sep. 2021
  • This network of private mercenary companies is deployed broadly around the world, serving as a deniable and expendable extension of the Kremlin’s foreign policy.
    Sebastien Roblin, Forbes, 15 Aug. 2022
  • Another movie is being developed around the Thunderbolts, a team of enhanced agents who engage in deniable military operations.
    Evan Narcisse, Rolling Stone, 14 Nov. 2022
  • In this context, the idea of Veselnitskaya as a deniable intermediary is not entirely implausible.
    Mark Galeotti, The Atlantic, 12 July 2017
  • As Russia invades Ukraine, the Kremlin is pushing to amplify influence worldwide, and ostensibly private military groups like Wagner offer a deniable way to advance its goals, researchers say.
    Washington Post, 9 Mar. 2022
  • India now collaborates with the United States on intelligence collection, the monitoring of Chinese military operations, and a range of other activities that are for the most part quiet and deniable.
    Ashley J. Tellis, Foreign Affairs, 20 Feb. 2020
  • The family-friendly megacompany can produce bleak material with a social purpose or mature subject matter under cover of plausibly deniable metaphor.
    Darren Franich, EW.com, 12 Nov. 2019
  • Analysts describe the group as an extension of Russia’s foreign policy through deniable activities, including the use of mercenaries and disinformation campaigns.
    New York Times, 31 May 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'deniable.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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