A bomb explosion, a train crash, a warship under attack and two people dead - all within a few days, and all part of the same unrelenting battle.

The place is Ukraine and at the focus of the battle is metal.

Unlike many of its former Soviet neighbours, the impoverished state of 50 million has enjoyed relative calm since the break-up of the Soviet Union.

But Ukraine, like some others in eastern Europe, seems nowhere near victory over the insidious "enemy from within", as one local daily put it.

The enemy attacks and destroys everything that contains even a few dollars worth of metal which can be sold as scrap, wreaking havoc across the country.

Easy money

As living standards plummeted, many people discovered that everyday details of the landscape such as power cables and sewer gratings are commodities just waiting to be snatched and sold for profit.

With the average monthly wage well below $100, a few pounds of copper from a stolen phone cable, the favourite prey of "metal hunters", can bring more cash than a hard day's work.

The greatest danger to a military unit is now posed by the enemy that knows his way to a scrap dealer

Kievskiye Vedomosti

The residents of some apartment blocks have been reduced to organizing night shifts to guard their building's power lines, Ukrainian television reported.

Previously a power blackout, a dead phone line or a car stuck in a gaping sewer hole was the worst that could happen.

Now the country's railways and even the army are feeling the pinch, and unlucky metal hunters can even pay with their lives for a few pounds of scrap.

Hard consequences

Earlier this month, a railway engine and three freight cars derailed near the port of Mykolayiv after local metal hunters dismantled a 50kg set of points.

There were no casualties, but the cars and the rail track suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage, and traffic on the railway line was blocked for a whole day.

Even the country's navy is not immune to thieves

The thieves, who were promptly caught by the police, hoped to make less than $6 selling the points mechanism as scrap, Ukrainian television said.

A few days later, a powerful bomb explosion ripped through a derelict air base to the east of Kiev.

The 15-year-old scrap hunter who found an old 120-pound bomb and tried to dismantle it was killed on the spot.

On the same day, a 14-year-old girl was found dead inside a power substation. She was electrocuted while trying to steal a few metres of cable, the TV reported.

Army under fire

The Ukrainian army, still reeling from the air show disaster in Lviv which killed 76 spectators, suffered further embarrassment when the navy corvette Kremenchuk was held up in broad daylight and robbed of its communication equipment.

Yesterday they took out a missile installation, today they feel at home on board a warship - where will they turn up tomorrow?

Kievskiye Vedomosti

The equipment contained several thousand dollars worth of precious metals.

The local daily Kievskiye Vedomosti was in shock.

"Three 22-year-old blockheads with no training, no skills and no special gear boarded the ship, attacked an officer, took the keys from the command post, grabbed the ship's radio and waved goodbye to the crew," the paper wrote.

Things had not been that bad since a Ukrainian air defence installation, the famous S-300 anti-aircraft missile system, lost its communication components to another gang of thieves.

"The greatest danger to a military unit is now posed by the enemy that knows his way to a scrap dealer. Yesterday they took out a missile installation, today they feel at home on board a warship. Where will they turn up tomorrow?" the paper fulminated.

No respite in sight

The government is well aware of the problem, and several attempts have already been made to crack down on scrap dealers.

The measures already tried range from persuading them to turn down dodgy offers to closing their businesses altogether.

However, analysts say, with the average wage in Ukraine just above the official subsistence level, supply is unlikely to dwindle as long as demand is there.

And the local bureaucracy will hardly want to lose a source of modest but steady backhanders from the scrap dealers.

Until that changes, a wooden sewer grating will last longer in Ukraine than a cast-iron model.

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.