I have found a nother example for a similar structure in the novel Дневной дозор, which is probably nothing a native speaker would think twice about but which is, as far as I see it, impossible to parse for a native speaker of German or English. Without the explanation in the previous posts I would not get it. The context is that a girl asks a witch to make her runaway lover come back, and the witch says:

Вернуть - вернёт, но удержать - не удержит.

A literal translation is impossible, but the meaning is something like "Bring him back, that's possible, but keep him (or: make him stay), no."

There is no end of such seemingly small ways of expressing things which are enormously difficult for a learner to figure out without the help of a native speaker, but they never turn up in grammar books or the like.