Mustang Wanted: Pavlo Ushivets’ Terrifying Height Videos from Ukraine

Mustang Wanted is the online name of Pavlo Ushivets, a Ukrainian urban climber from Kyiv whose videos of high-altitude stunts on towers, churches and bridges made him an internet celebrity. If heights make your palms sweat, his footage is about as hard to watch as video gets.

Who is Mustang Wanted?

Pavlo Gennadiyovich Ushivets was born on 21 January 1987 in Kyiv, where he still lives. He built his reputation climbing high structures in Ukraine and around the world, often with little or no safety equipment.

His best-known climbs include:

• the spires of the Votivkirche in Vienna;
• the Princess Tower in Dubai;
• the Most SNP bridge over the Danube in Bratislava;
• the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building in Moscow.

The videos: height and exposure

Two of his clips show his style at its rawest. “MW video compilation #1” strung together a series of climbs and hangs on different structures. “Mustang Wanted, old bridge”, below, follows him on an old bridge.

What makes the footage so unnerving is how it is framed. The camera stays close to his hands, feet and the steel he is holding, while the ground or river sits tiny and far below. Your eye keeps jumping between the two distances, and the brain does the rest. Wide-angle lenses stretch that gap even further.

The Moscow spire and Ukraine’s flag

His most famous stunt came on 19–20 August 2014. Ushivets climbed the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building in Moscow, painted the star on its spire in Ukrainian blue and raised a Ukrainian flag, dedicating the climb to Ukraine’s Independence Day on 24 August. The stunt won him the 2014 Troublemaker Award. That year he also publicly offered to hand himself over to Russian police in exchange for the release of the Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko.

In September 2016 he was at the Toronto International Film Festival for the announcement of We Kill Death, a film based on his exploits and those of three Russian climbers. In 2017 he told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that he would stop performing provocative stunts in Russia, and in September 2023 he revealed that he was serving in a combat role with the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Enjoy the view from a safe height

Unprotected climbing on buildings and bridges is lethal for anyone without years of specialised experience, and it is usually illegal. To get the same thrill of exposure, try a built viewpoint such as the Titlis Cliff Walk: The High-Alpine Bridge and the View Around It, or browse Thirty Photographs at Height: Perspective, Scale and the People Behind the Images and Mount Hua’s Exposed Routes: Beyond the “Deadliest Hike” Headline.

Related reading

Sources