A nagging question still bedevils Washington watchers in Moscow: was it really just an accidental mistranslation?
In March, when Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, presented Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, with a toy “reset” button, symbolising the US wish to restart relations with Moscow, the translation of “reset” in English was wrong. Rather than using the Russian word perezagruzka, it was written peregruzka, meaning overload or overstress. “I think it was a Freudian slip, at the very least,” joked Vladimir Shtol, a Nato specialist at Russia’s Diplomatic Academy in Moscow, this week.
