A 24-year-old Arizona YouTuber risked five years in an Indian prison to leave a can of Diet Coke on one of the world's most forbidden shores – and walked away with little more than a slap on the wrist.
Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, who runs the YouTube channel Neo-Orientalist, sailed to North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal on 29 March 2025 in a rubber dinghy, blew a whistle for an hour in an attempt to draw the attention of the Sentinelese tribe, and left a can of Diet Coke and a coconut on the sand. Indian police confirmed that Polyakov had made the illegal voyage to North Sentinel Island, a landmass roughly the size of Manhattan in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, approximately 1,200 kilometres from the Indian mainland, and that he was spotted by a local fisherman on his return and arrested two days later. On 22 May 2026, he published a video of the visit to his YouTube channel, after escaping a potential five-year sentence with a fine of just £127 ($161).
