Tourist who ‘visited isolated tribe with can of Diet Coke’ is held in jail

An American tourist accused of visiting a largely uncontacted tribe and leaving them a can of Diet Coke has been held in custody after his application for bail was denied.

Youtuber Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov was first detained in March 2025, two days after police say he set foot on North Sentinel Island, part of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and an archipelago nearly 750 miles east of the mainland.

The island is home to the Sentinelese, a tribe which has previously killed outsiders, and is strictly illegal to visit.

Despite this, Polyakov, 25, is said to have stayed on the island for about an hour, filming the stunt for his YouTube channel while blowing a whistle to attract the attention of the tribespeople.

After leaving the can of Coke and a coconut behind, claiming it was an ‘offering’, he collected some sand samples before returning to his boat, police say.

He was spotted by some local fishermen who reported him to the authorities.

He was later arrested in Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and was charged with entering a prohibited tribal reserve area, as well as breaking Indian laws which prevent outsiders from interacting with the Sentinelese.

Polyakov was denied bail in court this week, while also seeing his judicial custody extended, The Times reports. If convicted he could face up to five years in prison, with his next court appearance scheduled for April 29.

Investigators say the YouTuber had made two previous attempts to access the island – including one involving an inflatable kayak – and had researched accessibility to the island, as well as sea conditions and tides, before he set out.

A statement released by police at the time of his arrest said his ‘actions posed a serious threat to the safety and well-being of the Sentinelese people, whose contact with outsiders is strictly prohibited by the law to protect their indigenous way of life’.

Polyakov was previously revealed to have undertaken other travel-related stunts, such as visiting the Taliban and posing with guns.

He posted on his YouTube under the name ‘Neo-Orientalist’, referencing an orientalist thinking that the West is ‘more advanced’ than other cultures, such as the Middle East.

According to Survival International, a charity dedicated to working to protect tribal peoples, the Sentinelese have lived on the island for as long as 60,000 years.

The tribe is primitive, using hand-made canoes, and bows and arrows to hunt, gather and ward off unwanted visitors.

Crews who observed the island in the 1990s from boats moored a distance from shore reported bonfires on the beach at night and the sounds of people singing.

Women have been seen wearing fibre strings around their waists, necks and heads, while men wear necklaces and headbands with a thicker cover around their waist.

Since the 1800s, explorers, journalists and even royalty have attempted to make contact — all with varying degrees of success.

A team of anthropologists led by Trinok Nath Pandit began visiting the island in 1967 and continued to do so for decades, dropping off gifts including a pig toys, metal pots and pans, and coconuts.

While these built trust between the tribe and the anthropologists, the Indian government put a stop to the visits in 1996 after the relationship never progressed beyond the deliveries.

Outsiders also contacted the islanders after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, when a helicopter was sent to the region to see if they had been affected.

The tribe made the headlines again two years later after two Indian fishermen, Sunder Raj and Pandit Tiwari, were killed by the tribe when their boat broke loose from its mooring as they slept.

More recently, in November 2018, American missionary John Allen Chau attempted to visit the island in a bid to convert them to Christianity, and after being chased away on two previous occasions it’s believed he was killed.

The fishermen who had taken Chau near to the island saw tribe members dragging a body along the beach and burying it.

Writing in a journal which was left behind, Chau described North Sentinel was ‘Satan’s last stronghold’, showing frustration that he hadn’t been warmly welcomed to the island.

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