I unlinked this from "We could get caught" and retranslated it as "We could have gotten caught."

As I understand it, "Нас могли схватить" refers exclusively to the past: "There was a possibility that someone would have caught us." However, "We could get caught" refers exclusively to the future: "There is a possibility that someone will catch us."

One thing that makes the distinction complicated is that while "could" can represent either the past tense or the conditional of "can" , the context of a sentence can eliminate one of the meanings. The sentence "We could lift the rock" is ambiguous without this context: "Yesterday we could (= were able to) lift the rock" or "Tomorrow we could (= might be able to) lift the rock." However, "We could get caught" cannot apply to the past, so "*Yesterday we could get caught" is not a valid sentence.

I'll have to do some more thinking to decide how to come up with rules that determine whether "could" can or cannot represent the past in a given sentence.

I thought of a similar sentence where "could" can indicate either the past or the conditional: "He thought we could get caught." That could mean either "He thought that there was a possibility of getting caught [though that didn't happen]" or "He thought that there was a possibility of getting caught [and that possibility still exists]".

I still need to think about this some more.

The Russian sentence exclusively means "There was a possibility for us to be caught, but it didn't realise".

@AlanF_US
Could you also take a look at #6196187? The Belarusian translation is in the past tense, and I have doubts that it is correct.

@Wezel: Done.

@Selena777: Thanks for clarifying that.

Regarding the possible meanings of "could" in a given sentence, it's worth remembering that where some possibility might have materialized in the past, but didn't, it's better to use "could have" + a past participle, rather than "could".