The category of aspect, which exists in every language, can be expressed differently according to the language. For instance, in Russian there is the binary opposition between imperfective and perfective, whereas in Italian it is mainly the difference in the usage of tenses that conveys the category of aspect. This work aims at investigating the opposition between imperfective and perfective in cases where in expressing modality aspects enter into a conflict and they are opposed on the basis of modal meanings. At first different extracts are analyzed in Russian, and then translations of those extracts are compared through the contrastive method. Moreover, techniques and strategies used to achieve translation equivalence are highlighted especially in those cases where the choice of the aspect is motivated by modal meanings.