Background and career
Andrey Aleksandrovich Burim (born December 15, 1998), commonly known by his online alias Mellstroy, is a Belarusian streamer and blogger known by his provocative and eccentric personality accompanied by such livestreams held on Twitch and Kick platforms. In March 2024, he set a new record in the post-Soviet states for the highest number of concurrent viewers on a live stream, reaching over 720,000 viewers. He first gained widespread recognition in 2020 during his live broadcasts from the Moscow-City complex. He experienced a second wave of popularity in 2024 by organizing large-scale contests on social media, in which he offered rewards for videos about him, subscriptions, and video greetings from media celebrities and presidents. Since 2024, he has been actively engaged in charitable activities. In October 2025, he launched his own online casino.
Andrey Burim was born on December 15, 1998, in Gomel, Belarus, into a working-class family. His father worked at a factory, and his mother was a kiosk saleswoman. He has an older brother named Sergey. During his childhood, the family faced financial difficulties, which forced him to wear hand-me-down clothes from his brother. He is of Belarusian descent. In August 2024, he gave a three-hour interview to the project Vpiska, in which he stated that he had been interested in making money online since childhood. According to him, at around the age of 12, he created Minecraft game servers and tried his hand at trading. The blogger noted that, at first, his hobby was not supported by his family — his father was skeptical about these activities. However, after Andrey earned his first 100 US dollars online, his relatives’ attitude toward his work changed. After some time, he stopped his activities related to Minecraft and began playing Dota 2, where he engaged in trading in-game items. Later, he temporarily suspended his online presence. After completing nine or ten grades of school, Andrey entered a college to study electromechanics. During his time there, he occasionally experienced bullying. According to his recollections, he never provoked conflicts himself.
Shortly after enrolling in a vocational school, he dropped out and began creating gaming content on YouTube. Mellstroy started his online activity by publishing Let's Play videos on Minecraft, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. These videos did not bring him widespread recognition, and he later changed the format of his content, focusing on live streaming and interactive communication with viewers. To attract an audience and increase his number of subscribers, Mellstroy often incorporated provocative elements into his live broadcasts. During his streams, he and the participants performed actions that potentially posed a risk to their health. He hosted online sessions on Skype and Chatroulette, during which he interacted with female participants and encouraged them to perform various actions on camera while broadcasting the footage on YouTube. In exchange, he promised them promotion on social media and publicity for their accounts. After some time, he focused on creating prank content in which he would meet girls while pretending to be someone else. The format proved successful, and the blogger began receiving advertising offers, including from online casinos, prize giveaways, and other promotions. In 2020, he moved to Moscow, where he began conducting live streams.
In 2020, he rented an apartment in the Moscow-City complex, which allowed him to expand the scale and improve the quality of his so-called "streams". Following the rise in popularity of Mellstroy’s streams, he began receiving collaboration offers from online casinos. Mellstroy actively promoted their advertisements, which drew criticism from other bloggers. During his broadcasts, he repeatedly admitted that the main sources of his multimillion-dollar income were advertising and affiliate programs of online casinos. During the COVID-19 pandemic, IRL streamers gained widespread popularity on the platform Twitch. Instead of playing video games, they broadcast their daily lives and interacted with audiences, creating a sense of presence during lockdowns. Mellstroy became known for his streams, which brought him his greatest popularity. He hosted multi-hour broadcasts from his apartment in the Moscow-City complex, inviting internet personalities such as Edward Bill, Ruki-Bazuki, Polnoe TV, and VJLink, as well as numerous guests, organizing challenges with cash rewards. By mid-2020, Mellstroy had attracted an audience of 500,000 viewers. The atmosphere at Mellstroy’s parties was often compared to that of The Great Gatsby.
In October 2020, while in Moscow, Mellstroy struck a woman named Alyona Yefremova twice by hitting her head against a table during one of his streams. The incident drew attention from several popular bloggers with multimillion audiences, who criticized Mellstroy for his actions. Among them were Nikolay Sobolev, Ruslan Usachev, and Dmitry Larin. Mellstroy himself stated: "Yes, I am guilty. I must face an appropriate punishment strictly within the framework of the law." Immediately after the incident, Mellstroy’s YouTube channel was blocked. He also stated that online casinos had refused to cooperate with him due to the criminal case opened against him; however, he continued to host gaming streams by creating temporary channels, which were soon taken down. In July 2021, the Presnensky District Court of Moscow sentenced blogger Andrey Burim (Mellstroy) to six months of correctional labor. The court also ordered him to pay 22,444 rubles to cover the victim’s medical expenses and 50,000 rubles as compensation for moral damages. In September 2022, he transferred 17,000 US dollars to Yury Khovansky to help him purchase an apartment in Serbia. Khovansky thanked Mellstroy for his assistance and stated that he now had enough money to buy the apartment, adding that he had “completely changed his opinion of Mellstroy.” Earlier, in 2021, Khovansky had proposed banning streams in Russia. During this period, Mellstroy frequently mentioned having multimillion debts, which he attempted to repay through gambling winnings. He rarely hosted house-party streams and announced his return in November 2022.
In December 2022, Mellstroy held a comeback stream. He rented a house with a service staff for 4 million rubles and raffled off a Maybach car, which was won by a viewer who had donated about 2 million rubles (while the car itself was valued at 11 million). The stream also featured Alyona Yefremova, with whom he had apparently reconciled. She appeared in a revealing outfit and took part in a roulette of dares. The broadcast, conducted in his characteristic manner, was titled "The Return of Friends". In January 2023, he left Russia for the United Arab Emirates and spent some time living in Dubai. Over the following months, the blogger stayed in Bali, Mauritius, and the Seychelles before returning to Dubai. That same month, he moved to the platform Kick. The streamer was permanently banned from Twitch and Trovo for promoting online casinos, following an appeal by Ekaterina Mizulina, head of the Safe Internet League. Other streamers who were banned included Egor Kreed, Maddyson, Buster, PLOHOYPAREN, and Kudes. Mellstroy also stated that he had “pulled himself together,” stopped drinking alcohol, and repaid debts totaling 130 million rubles within a month and a half. In the summer of 2023, he once again drew public attention. Mellstroy sent large monetary donations to popular Russian Internet streamers, offering them to complete various challenges, including shaving their heads live on stream. The amounts ranged from several hundred thousand to several million Russian rubles. Over the course of several weeks, Mellstroy “had dozens of the biggest Runet streamers shave their heads.” He donated 500,000 rubles to Restorator, 2 million to Kussia, 4 million to Strogo, and 5 million to JesusAVGN. He also attempted to persuade streamer Papich to return to playing Dota 2 by offering him 1 million rubles; Papich had not played the game since 2019. In total, Mellstroy donated nearly 10 million rubles over the span of five days.
