KHARKIV, UKRAINE / ACCESS Newswire / May 6, 2026 / Yaroslav the Wise National Law University and serial entrepreneur Sergei Petryk have signed a memorandum of cooperation to accelerate the digitization of one of Europe’s oldest legal libraries and establish Y-Park, a dedicated LegalTech and AI innovation hub. The initiative aims to attract over $100 million in grants, institutional funding, and private partnerships through 2031, positioning continental Europe’s first dedicated legal technology hub in Kharkiv, 30 kilometers from the Russian border, a city where air raid alerts regularly last up to 20 hours a day.
The partnership represents a strategic convergence of institutional legacy and entrepreneurial infrastructure-building. Yaroslav the Wise, founded in 1804, holds 26,000 rare legal volumes dating back to the 16th century, including Polish Kingdom legislation, Roman law treatises from 1826, and publications from the Juridical Society at Kharkiv Imperial University. Ten thousand volumes have been digitized over the past two decades; 16,000 remain. Once digitized, this collection becomes a unique dataset for training legal AI models, a continental European equivalent of Harvard Law School’s Caselaw Access Project.
“If we don’t digitize this now, we won’t lose books. We’ll lose a competitive advantage that took 220 years to build,” said Sergei Petryk, who is coordinating international donor outreach and providing marketing support for the initiative.
The global LegalTech market is valued at $27.6 billion and projected to reach $35.6 billion by 2027. Ukraine currently has no dedicated LegalTech hub. Y-Park aims to fill that gap by combining historical legal knowledge with cutting-edge AI infrastructure.
Digital Law Library
Y-Park is creating the first Ukrainian legal AI corpus built on 300 years of legal heritage. The digitization initiative will process 26,000+ rare legal documents spanning centuries of European legal thought-from 16th-century Polish Kingdom legislation to 19th-century Roman law treatises and publications from the Juridical Society at Kharkiv Imperial University.
The corpus will be available in 8 languages, making it accessible to legal researchers, AI developers, and policymakers across Europe and beyond. This multilingual dataset is unprecedented in legal AI development; most existing legal corpora are limited to single jurisdictions or languages. The Ukrainian legal archive, by contrast, reflects centuries of cross-border legal influence and institutional continuity.
The institutional foundation is equally significant. Yaroslav the Wise National Law University counts ten of eighteen justices on Ukraine’s Constitutional Court among its alumni-a concentration of legal authority that underscores the archive’s relevance to contemporary Ukrainian governance. The university’s 220-year history has produced generations of legal scholars, judges, and policymakers whose work is embedded in the rare documents now being digitized.
By converting this institutional memory into a machine-readable format, Y-Park is not simply preserving historical documents. It is building the foundational dataset for a new generation of legal AI tools trained on deep, domain-specific knowledge rather than generic legal text. This approach positions Ukrainian legal technology at the forefront of a global shift toward specialized, historically-grounded AI systems.
The Y-Park Vision
Y-Park’s architecture includes CODEX MUDRYI, a digital library platform that will make rare legal texts accessible to researchers and AI developers globally. The hub will also feature a civic initiative platform modeled on Latvia’s ManaBalss.lv and a legal navigator designed to help over one million Ukrainian veterans navigate 156 separate legislative acts across 18 government agencies.
The university’s revenue model includes 12 distinct streams, from digital library subscriptions to equity stakes in LegalTech spin-offs, with a target of 40% financial self-sufficiency within five years. The project references Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center, Stanford CODEX, Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, and the University of Helsinki’s Legal Tech Lab as models for academic collaboration.
About Sergei Petryk and The Partnership
Sergei Petryk brings 20 years of experience building international infrastructure projects at the intersection of technology, education, and society. He has organized over 70 international conferences with audiences reaching 35,000, and produced a blockchain livestream that drew 121,348 concurrent viewers, a Guinness World Record verified and published on the organization’s official website. His role in Y-Park centers on marketing strategy, international network activation, and donor coordination.
Founded in 1804, Yaroslav the Wise National Law University is Ukraine’s oldest and most prestigious law school. Ten of eighteen justices on Ukraine’s Constitutional Court are alumni. The university’s library holds one of Europe’s most significant collections of rare legal works, spanning centuries of European legal thought and development.
Broader Context
The partnership reflects a broader trend among Ukrainian diaspora entrepreneurs investing in institutional infrastructure. Notable examples include Ukrainian-founded global companies such as GitLab and Revolut, as well as emerging platforms like DeHealth, which, under co-founder Anna Bon, has built an AI-powered medical data infrastructure operating in over 80 countries. The civic-economic movement Energy Nation describes this as the emergence of a distributed economy, where diaspora networks function as a global support system for Ukraine’s reconstruction and development.
Official Source: Yaroslav the Wise National Law University – Memorandum Announcement
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