Ukraine Billionaire Igor Kolomoisky Offers to Build £80m Electric Fence to Keep Out Putin

One of the richest men in Ukraine wants to build a new version of the Iron Curtain to keep Russia out of his country – an electric fence running the whole length of the border between the two countries.

Igor Kolomoisky wants to sink up £80m of his vast personal fortune into helping his country repel forces aligned to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This ambitious scheme could easily be dismissed, except that Kolomoisky has the ear of the political elite in Ukraine - thanks of him being a major player in the country's energy market and also governor of the country's largest industrial region, Dnipropetrovsk.

Kolomoisky's personal wealth is estimated to be between $3bn-$6bn.

As a result, he has already suggested the idea to President Petro Poroshenko. Explaining why an electric fence would help, a spokesman for Kolomoisky said: "The objective is to prevent people from breaking in from a country waging aggression."

If ever constructed, the fence would be 1,200 miles long and made of high-strength steel, with electric current coursing through it. There would also be moats on both sides to deter incursions and underline the point.

But one issue confronting any effort to actually construct such a fence is that the border between Russia and Ukraine has long been porous, meaning it is questionable how feasible a new version of Israel's so-called Peace Wall to keep out Palestinians, really is in Ukraine.

A killer fence is not Kolomoisky's first foray into defending the Motherland in the best he can – namely with giant piles of cash. Earlier in the conflict with Russia, the 51-year-old offered to pay £6,000 for every Russian "saboteur" captured by Ukrainians.

Under the bounty system he drew up, each machine gun would be worth $1,000, a heavy machine gun worth $1,500 and every grenade launcher seized from Kremlin-aligned forces worth $2,000.