A study on aspectual triplets in Russian gives an interesting perspective on how to analyze and evaluate Russian verbal aspectual system as a whole. Russian verbal aspect is the lexico-grammatical category in which lexical and aspectual features are still more closely related to each other, than many researchers have considered. We think that this close relationship between them has been underestimated. In this article, we critically analyzed previous studies on aspectual triplets, such as Зализняк & Шмелёв(2000), Зализняк & Микаэлян(2010), and Храковский(2005). If we treat Russian verbal aspect as a purely grammatical system, we are likely to fall into a methodological dilemma, as Зализняк & Шмелев did. But if we focus on a lexical synonymy, which Храковский set as a criterion for judging aspectual triplets, we can be relatively free from that kind of dilemma. Nonetheless, we must say that Храковский did not fully pay attention to differences in the usages between primary and secondary imperfective aspects. In this study, we analyzed the examples extracted from the Russian National Corpus to reveal differences in the usages of the verbs ‘читать vs. прочитывать’, ‘есть vs. съедать’, and ‘пить vs выпивать’. The differences in the usages between them turned out to be evident. Primary imperfective aspect fulfills such functions, as ‘ordinary imperfective usages’, ‘relative backgrounding’, and ‘atemporal evaluation’, whereas secondary imperfective aspect fulfills such functions, as ‘quantitative specification’, ‘relative foregrounding/focusing’, ‘metaphorical focalization’, ‘pseuo-historical present’ and ‘dramatic present’ and so on.