Russia’s army could lose almost two million soldiers during the war with Ukraine at its current casualty rate, the UK’s Defence chief warned.

General Sir Roly Walker said Russia’s dead and wounded could reach as many as 1.8 million if Vladimir Putin keeps throwing his troops to the slaughter.

He also estimated it could take Putin another five years to secure territories it illegally declared as belonging to Russia in 2022 at a Kremlin ceremony.

These include Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions, where Russian troops continue to face ferocious Ukrainian resistance.

The former SAS boss said the Kremlin would lose “untold billions” worth of military equipment.

But he warned that Putin and his cronies appeared prepared to absorb these horrific numbers of casualties given that “their calculus is different to ours”.

The UK’s Ministry of Defence has estimated that Russia has lost a staggering 550,000 soldiers in just over two years of fighting.

However, the figure could balloon to three times that amount if Russia continues with its current tactics.

“If they carry on as they are, it will probably take the Russians five years to grind their way to their minimum objectives of the four oblasts,” General Sir Roly Walker told an audience at the Rusi think tank in London.

“At the current rate of attrition of dead and wounded, that puts them probably well north of 1.5million casualties to achieve that, with untold billions of lost equipment.

“The big ‘if’ is if the Ukrainian armed forces can sustain the defence that they have.”

He added: “I think the dilemma is on the Russian regime.

“There has got to be more things for Russia to worry about than losing the best part of 1.5 to 1.8 million people for a slice of Ukraine with the way the world is going.”

Ukraine‘s army said it had killed or wounded another 1,140 Russians in the last 24 hours, and destroyed 14 tanks.

Photos shared on social media channels appear to show Soviet-era tanks that were used to put down the 1956 Hungarian Revolution being rushed to the front in Ukraine from storages