The Vjacheslav Lypyns'kyj Research Center is a public not-for-profit organization created to inform the public and the media in matters of crucial civil and cultural issues facing Ukrainian society now and to coordinate the efforts of academics and journalists. The Center was established in January 2007 and does not participate in any political activity.

The Center was created in response to an upsurge of un-academic, politicized and mythologized ideas about the history and the present state of Ukrainian society prevalent throughout the Ukrainian media-sphere and to address the reckless indifference to the destruction of the cultural heritage and historical environment.  The Center’s founders believe it is necessary to foster an implementation of modern standards in the preservation of cultural heritage and in dealing with the Past in the Ukraine, to popularize academic and expert opinions on the subject, and to shape an adequate public opinion.  The individual’s right to have free access to objective and unbiased information guides the work of the Center.

To address the aforementioned challenges, the Center organizes interviews with well known specialists in the field, round tables and conferences intended to create public resonance.  The Center’s target audiences are the journalistic community, teachers and the young.  The Center also prepares materials both academic in nature and adapted for the general public, in print and in electronic form, that state positions and propositions of the expert community on the current cultural issues.  Prepared materials are distributed free of charge.  Additionally, the Center publishes the popular series “LIKBEZ-ABETKA”.

The Center is named after Vjacheslav Lypyns'kyj (Waclaw Lipin’ski, 1882-1931) – a prominent Ukraininan thinker, politician, historian and diplomat of Polish origin.  V. L. was born in 1882 in Volyn to a family of Polish nobility.  In 1900 he joined the Ukrainian national movement.  V. L. studied in the universities of Krakow and Geneva and took part in WWI.  In 1918-1919, V. L. became an ambassador to Austro-Hungary representing the newly independent Ukraine.  After its fall in 1919-1920, V. L. was live the rest of his life in exile in Austria (1919-1926, 1927-1931) and in Germany (1926-1927). There he became the founder of the Ukrainian conservative-monarchist (hetmanist) faction of the followers of Pavlo Skoropadsky (Hetman of Ukraine in 1918).  His work as a historian focused on fate of the Ukrainian nobility (shlyakhta) during the 17th century and the Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s uprising (1648-1657). V. Lypyns’kyj was one of the founders of the Ukrainian state school of thought in history.   As a political and social thinker V. Lypyns’kyj offered the only intellectual opposition to the leftist and the radical nationalistic tendencies in the contemporary Ukrainian ideological movement.  Lypyns’kyj’s priorities were the supremacy of the law, private property, political civic nation, and the responsible national elite.  V. Lypyns’kyj died in 1931 in Austria and was buried in Volyn.