A second-hand translation for the Russian Tsar. About 17th century translations of news items in "Vesti-Kuranty". "Vesti-Kuranty" is the name generally used for the early handwritten Russian 'newspapers' that were produced at the Posol'skij Prikaz, the Russian Diplomatic Chancellery, for more than a hundred years, right up until the first printed newspaper was established (Vedomosti; from 1703). During that time, those news summaries were called either vesti ('reports') or kuranty (from Courant). In most cases these were translations of Western European printed sources such as news pamphlets about a specific event, political pamphlets and periodical newspapers. In many cases the sources used in Moscow can still be traced in libraries and archives in Moscow as well as in Western Europe. Sometimes the sources used in Moscow were themselves translations from another language which meant that the Russian translation was in fact a second-hand translation. This study looks at an example of one of these second-hand translations which has as its subject the Proxy given by King Philip IV of Spain to his negotiators to arrange with the States General of the Netherlands a peace treaty to end the Eighty Years War. (The treaty itself was signed on the 30th of January 1648 in Munster.) The Spanish King's Proxy, originally written in Spanish, was translated into Dutch (probably in Munster) and eventually printed in the Netherlands together with the text of the Treaty and other accompanying documents. We have managed to find the exact publication used by the Russian translators in the Library of the University of Leiden. This study encompasses not only some social-historical background of the first Russian newspaper translations and their sources, but also a detailed analysis of all the relevant versions of the Spanish Proxy – from the original Spanish handwriting, via the Dutch intermediate version to the final Russian translation. Particular attention has been paid to mistakes in the Russian version which can be traced to ...