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Officials in Crimea are warning people to stop stealing sand from tourist beaches, or else face a prison sentence.

The peninsula's beaches are being targeted by people who remove the sand for use as free building material, the . At more remote beaches it's being taken away by the lorry-load, the paper says.

"Everyone we catch at this needs to be prosecuted," says Sergei Aksyonov, prime minister of Crimea's Russian-backed government. "When people are stealing sand in broad daylight, what exactly are we doing about it?" According to , Mr Aksyonov wants to get Russia's FSB - the successor agency to the KGB - involved to help catch them.

Sand theft can hit local authorities finances hard. In February, a group of builders with illegally removing more than 1bn roubles-worth ($15.4m; £10.6m) near Moscow.

But while Crimea's authorities might be fretting over the financial impact, the idea of bare beaches has tickled Russians on social media. One person commenting jokes that the beach is being washed away by an American warship making waves in the Black Sea, and another suggests officials should reinforce the sand by mixing it with concrete: "Try carrying it off then."

For Russian writer Lev Rubinstein, it an old Soviet-era joke: "What happens if socialism comes to the Sahara? Nothing at first, but then the sand shortages will start."

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