An American YouTuber was arrested shortly after trying to contact a remote tribe on an island in the Indian Ocean. The people living on North Sentinel Island are famously one of the last uncontacted tribes of the world, and there is a strict policy against people going there. It is mainly to protect the tribe from outside contact and preserve their way of life. Some people have attempted to contact the tribe before and been killed by them, namely American evangelical missionary John Allen Chau, who landed on the island in 2018.
25-year-old Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov was luckier during a recent illegal trip to the island. The content creator was slammed for leaving a can of Diet Coke for an uncontacted Indian Ocean tribe, and explained that he wanted to leave an “offering” to the tribe. He was arrested in March 2025 after setting foot on the island, and has now revealed why he decided to do it. He had spent an hour on the island and blew a whistle to try to summon the tribe, but nobody came. He recently uploaded the unseen footage, but it is unclear how he recovered it after Indian authorities asked him to hand it over.
He claimed he wanted to “transport them thousands of years into the future” and “say hello”. He was slammed for potentially putting the lives of the tribe at risk.
He spoke to Dutch media this week and said that he is “vaccinated against the flu and measles”. “I never intended to come into direct contact with them,” he told AD.
“And as far as I know, you can’t catch diseases simply by looking at each other. I am receiving a lot of reactions, both positive and negative. I am open to that – a lively debate is healthy.”
“I wanted to give them a gift that is representative of our civilisation,” he added. “I have reservations about India’s policy regarding this island, but I understand the reasons that led the government to adopt this position.
“But I have no illusions about what people think of me. Everyone is free to think what they want.”
Following his visit to the island, he was detained in Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Police then launched an investigation, with Polyakov accused of violating Indian laws that prohibit outsiders from interacting with the isolated islanders.
In April, a court in Port Blair rejected his application for bail. A police statement at the time of his arrest said that the YouTuber 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”.
An investigation revealed that he had made two previous attempts to visit the island. Survival International, a group that protects the rights of Indigenous peoples, called his actions “idiotic”.
Director Caroline Pearce said: “This person’s actions not only endangered his own life, but they also put the lives of the entire Sentinelese tribe at risk.”
They also said that outsiders could pass on diseases to which uncontacted tribes have no immunity.
