Yurii Lypa: a Black Sea Ukraine and the partition of Russia

Who was Yurii Lypa

Yurii Lypa (1900–1944), the son of the prominent activist Ivan Lypa, was a physician, poet, and geopolitician. In the assessment of the historian Ihor Stambol, he built up concepts more relevant than anything anyone in Ukraine has formulated since^[1]. His major work is a geopolitical trilogy: “The Destiny of Ukraine” (1938), “The Black Sea Doctrine” (1940), and “The Partition of Russia” (1941), in which he reflected on Ukraine’s place in the world, its economic power, and the historical foundations of its statehood.

Black Sea, not Muscovite

Lypa’s first major thesis is Ukraine’s Black Sea orientation. He emphasized Crimea, the Black Sea, Taurida, and the Greek (Pontic) heritage of the Ukrainian lands: Greek colonization, the Bosporan Kingdom, Kerch-Panticapaeum^[2]. Ukraine, he argued, is rooted not in the Muscovite “north” but in the Black Sea–Mediterranean space. In “The Black Sea Doctrine” he proposed a union of Black Sea states — Ukraine, Turkey, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania — as a counterweight to Moscow.

”The Partition of Russia” — a thesis ahead of its time

The most topical today is the work “The Partition of Russia.” Stambol notes that at international conferences (including with the participation of NATO representatives) Western analysts still do not accept the idea of Russia’s disintegration — they see it as a “monolith” that supposedly need only be reformed in a democratic direction^[3]. Lypa argued the opposite 80 years ago: an empire built on the subjugation of dozens of peoples cannot be reformed, and the only humane and realistic way to overcome the threat it poses is decolonization — partition into its natural components.

The price of truth

Lypa’s own fate shows how much his ideas frightened Moscow. He was tortured to death by the NKVD in August 1944 (his body, bearing the marks of torture, was found near Yavoriv). And in the Soviet era his daughters did not even know who their parents were: the family was under constant surveillance^[4]. This is a classic imperial practice — destroy a thinker and erase the very memory of him.

What this means

Lypa is an example of Ukrainian geopolitical thought seeing Ukraine’s distinctness and the Russian Empire’s vulnerability long before 2022. This is no “exotica”: the thesis of Russia’s decolonization is today seriously discussed by scholars and politicians. Of course, Lypa was a figure of his time, an age of loud interwar ideologies, and his texts are more visionary journalism than strictly academic work. But his central intuition — that Ukraine is of the Black Sea, and that Russia is not eternal — proved far more perceptive than the notion, widespread in the West, of an “unshakable monolith.”