If you’ve been anywhere near a computer in the past ten years, you’ll have seen some of their exploits online. The videos of their dangerous escapades – crazy climbs without ropes or safety nets, or frantic scrambles through subway tunnels – are viral gold. They’re often featured on mainstream newspaper websites as well as being shared thousands of times by awestruck viewers on Facebook and Youtube.

But it’s not just that. “I have this idea that urban exploration is kind of a hobby for the poor,” Dima says. “You get into it at an age when all teenagers become adrenaline junkies but in Ukraine many people don’t have money – you can’t snowboard, you can’t skydive, you can’t do all the crazy shit that people in the United States can do, or in the UK. Ukrainian people still want the adrenaline so that’s how people get it, though urban exploration. You just find adrenaline where you can.”

Stryzhevskiy roped in Angel Angelov and Artyom Baburin, a DOP and sound designer he knew who were also interested in urban exploration, and the four of them set to work filming. They scaled buildings, walked thousands of kilometres of underground tunnels and had several narrow escapes. “We were doing photography in this underground river tunnel,” says Dima “and we were around 100 metres from the exit.”

“If it rains heavily outside then there is a wave created within like three or four minutes. It started raining and we didn’t even realise, we just saw the water start rising really quickly. We had to run back to the exit and got fully submerged on the way. We narrowly made it out.”

On another occasion, Nikita fell onto a concrete floor from “about three or four metres up”, just missing several “big bits of metal sticking out”.

“If I fell on one of them I could’ve died,” he says, “and even if I just broke my body it would’ve been bad. We were in an abandoned factory that was closed off and the only way to get out was the way we got in – a little window over three metres high.”

In the nuclear bunker video, one of the Insiders Project episodes, Gromov wanders around an abandoned civil defence shelter that’s still stuffed with everything the workers in the factory above would’ve needed to survive in the event of an atomic attack.

There are old military radio sets, medical kits containing anti-radiation pills and boxes and boxes of gasmasks that have never been used. At one stage he finds a whole load of hand-painted posters explaining how to administer first aid to fellow citizens in the event of an attack. There’s even a letter written by a bored soldier to his girlfriend.

Anywhere else in the world relics like this would be in a museum. In Ukraine they are just left lying around for people to discover, if they’re intrepid enough. As Gromov himself says: “It’s like a museum where you can touch all the exhibits, but only if you can get here.”

What sets Dima, Nikita, Angel and Artyom apart from other Ukrainian urban explorers is the attitude they take to this history. Gromov is disparaging of people who just break into places for the sake of it, or climb buildings to post selfies. “Many people do urban exploration in Ukraine but most of them are not serious. They are teenagers who just put some videos on Youtube of climbing and stuff like that.”

“I love parkour but where’s the story there?”

When she first saw footage from Dima and co. however, she realised it was something different. “They go to these amazing locations, like the highest building in Kiev, but with all of those locations the idea is not just to conquer it, it’s also to tell a story. They love history, they really are interested in the background of each object. And I like that they have these ethics – I think many urban explorers have these ethics but not all of them – these guys would never destroy anything that they touch.”

Not only that, but Kateryna and her colleagues were blown away by the quality of the visuals that the guys were producing. “They’re not just urban explorers, they know how to film. They have a proper education when it comes to this kind of thing – they are directors, producers they do their own sound engineering, they do post production. They came to us with a couple of episodes they’d fully self-financed and filmed. They showed us those and they just looked beautiful.”

Even with all this, the project would probably never have got the green light elsewhere. In the UK or the US, worries about health and safety or insurance would probably have killed it off before it even began – it’s hard to imagine a production company in the west condoning someone climbing a skyscraper without any safety equipment. Thankfully for the crew, attitudes to these things are slightly more relaxed in Ukraine. “It’s not illegal [what they’re doing] says Kateryna, it’s kind of a grey area.

“It’s like a museum where you can touch all the exhibits, but only if you can get here.”

“We get permits where we can but some of those locations don’t officially belong to anybody so there is no-one to ask. Also, there’s no damage done. In one episode they climb a bridge and you’ll see that at the end there’s a police unit waiting for them when they come down. The police couldn’t really charge them with anything, as there’s no damage. At most it’s an administrative fine. We just left the scene as we found it. Watching the police fume with frustration is priceless in itself.”

Their objective, Dima explains, was a military bunker that was actually still manned. “It’s an old aviation command centre but there are still people working there. So someone could just walk through a door at any time and we’d have to duck into cover.”

“We accessed the aviation centre three times, and two of those times we had to run away from soldiers with weapons. They chased us out from that bunker through the tube tunnels and into the proper metro.” They’re laughing as they tell me the story. But it could quite easily have ended badly. “We actually don’t know what would happen if we got caught,” says Dima. “There are eight people, other urban explorers, who went to prison for this kind of trespassing.”

In the face of these dangers, I can’t help asking: What do their mothers think? “Well parents…” Nikita starts, and the whole crew laugh. “Well, they get nervous when we go to a new location, but ultimately they are very proud of what we’re doing. By default a lot of people are prejudiced against urban exploration because they think these people are just low lifes, getting on top of roofs. But when they actually see what we do and the pictures we take and the approach to the whole thing they go like ‘Oh wow, we didn’t know that existed, it’s so cool.’”

Dima chuckles: “Yes, my mother and even my grandmother, they look at the photos and video and they’re like: ‘Woah, that’s my Dima! Check it out, it’s Dima.’”

Perhaps, I think as I hang up the Skype chat, it’s this as much as any of the socio-economic factors that explains why Ukraine is such a hotbed for urban explorers, and why this particular group are able to push the boundaries in the way they have. Maybe this is the final piece of the puzzle – they have very understanding mothers.

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