After promising to “push the reset button” on relations with Moscow, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planned to present Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a light-hearted gift at their talks here Friday night to symbolize the Obama administration’s desire for a new beginning in the relationship.
It didn’t quite work out as she planned.
She handed him a palm-sized box wrapped with a bow. Lavrov opened it and pulled out the gift—a red plastic button on a black base with a Russian word “peregruzka” printed on top.
“We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” Clinton said as reporters, allowed in to observe the first few minutes of the meeting, watched.
“You got it wrong,” Lavrov said, to Clinton’s clear surprise. Instead of "reset," he said the word on the box meant “overcharge.” He should have bargained up for the Gordon Brown DVD set!
Clinton and Lavrov guffawed. “We won’t let you do that to us,” she said.
Despite the shoddy translation work on the U.S. side, Clinton and Lavrov emerged from their meeting a few hours later saying they had accomplished their initial goal—reducing the frostiness in U.S.-Russia relations that had taken hold by the end of the Bush administration.
At a joint press conference afterward Clinton and Lavrov called each other by their first names and said they had conducted wide-ranging discussions on Iran, missile defense, Afghanistan, and nuclear arms reduction. They agreed to intensify preparations for opening a new round of nuclear arms negotiations to replace the one that expires at the end of this year.
They each emphasized that major disagreements and disputes remain on matters such as U.S. support for Georgia, the former Soviet republic invaded by Moscow last year, and on an announced sale by Moscow of advanced air defense missiles to Iran. The improvement in tone was unmistakable compared to the icy encounters that Lavrov used to hold with Clinton’s predecessor.
But in a meeting largely devoid of concrete accomplishments, Clinton’s gift became a source of continuing amusement to everyone except her staff, who realized that flubbing a foreign language hardly made their boss, the nation’s top diplomat, look good.
When a Russian reporter asked her about the mistake, Clinton conceded that Lavrov had “corrected our word choice” and went on to gamely make the best of it. “In a way the word that was on the button turns out also to be true,” she argued Though Lavrov had said that word on the button meant overcharge, Clinton suggested that that peregruzka could also be translated as overload.
“We are resetting so the minister and I have an overload of work,” she said
But Lavrov refused to let the matter rest there, bringing it up twice more during the press conference in a way that suggested he wasn’t completely unhappy at Clinton’s discomfort.
“We have reached agreement on how reset should sound in both Russian and English,” he announced at one point. “We have no disagreement here.”
A few minutes later, he referred to the gift again, noting that he and Clinton had pressed the button together—a move that summoned up thoughts not of easing tension but of launching a nuclear strike.
“It is a very, very large red button,” he said. “I do hope that Russia and the United States and other countries would never ever push any other buttons associated with initiation of destructive hostilities.”
