That's some shady word mincing. Who are they afraid of, US Congress? journalists? Who would be asking these questions.
This is in the same vein as "we never engaged in water torture!". But did you use "enhanced interrogation techniques using water?". You can still answer "No", if you use diesel fuel instead, you see.
> Every morning, officers recalled, the Ukrainians and Americans gathered to survey Russian weapons systems and ground forces and determine the ripest, highest-value targets
> Given the delicacy of the mission, was it unduly provocative to call targets “targets”?
It's about "the delicacy" of the mission not them moving or not moving. It could have been "potential targets" or "moving targets" instance otherwise.
> “If you ever get asked the question, ‘Did you pass a target to the Ukrainians?’ you can legitimately not be lying when you say, ‘No, I did not,’” one U.S. official explained.
The un-named "US official" spelled it out for us eventually so we don't have to guess and read between the lines.
> All the Ukrainians would see on a secure cloud were chains of coordinates, divided into baskets — Priority 1, Priority 2 and so on. As General Zabrodskyi remembers it, when the Ukrainians asked why they should trust the intelligence, General Donahue would say: “Don’t worry about how we found out. Just trust that when you shoot, it will hit it, and you’ll like the results, and if you don’t like the results, tell us, we’ll make it better.”