YOU MEAN, HOW MUCH OF RUSSIA DOES HE GET TO KEEP?:

The Kremlin reflected the disarray of its forces on the ground, where territory was rapidly changing hands, acknowledging that it did not yet know what new borders Russia would claim in southern Ukraine. "In terms of the borders, we're going to continue to consult with the population of these regions," Putin's spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters Monday.

The military conscription Putin ordered Sept. 21 to bolster his battered forces has set off nationwide turmoil and protest, bringing the war home to many Russians who had felt untouched by it. Many men have been drafted who were supposed to be ineligible based on factors such as age or disability.

On Monday, the governor of the Khabarovsk region in the Far East said that half of the men called up there, numbering in the thousands, should not have been drafted and had been sent home and that the region's military commissar had been dismissed.

Putin had meant for Monday to be a triumphant day in Moscow, where the lower house of Russia's rubber-stamp parliament, the State Duma, voted unanimously to ratify his proclaimed annexation of four Ukrainian regions after sham referendums there.

But events on the battlefield threatened to make a mockery of such declarations, as Ukrainians continued to recapture blasted, largely depopulated cities and towns from the retreating Russians. North of Lyman, the village of Pisky-Radkivski, retaken last week, was littered with burned-out Russian tanks, abandoned Russian gear and the bodies of Russian soldiers Monday.

Ukraine claimed Monday to have destroyed a Russian armored column near the village of Torske in the Donetsk region, east of Lyman and just 20 miles from Lysychansk. The attack left roads in the dense pine forest cluttered with burned tanks and armored vehicles, said Vladyslav Podkich, a Ukrainian military spokesperson.

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