"In the short term, this project will be difficult to implement primarily for economic reasons," said Volodymyr Fesenko of Kiev's Penta think-tank.
"It needs huge amounts of money that right now Ukraine doesn't have," he added.
Intended as a highly sophisticated system, combining defense measures with modern electronic surveillance tools, the European Rampart is scheduled to be completed by 2018.
Ukraine began work on the barrier in September last year but the project has been held up by its enormous cost to the cash-strapped state.
Initially estimated at $1 billion, Kiev was forced to slash the budget for the border fence by 75 percent.
Bureaucratic problems common in post-Soviet Ukraine — in this instance about which state body should oversee the work — have added to the setbacks, with the border service eventually put in charge.
