Yukhym "Fima" Chupakhin was born in Krivoy Rog (Kryvyi Rih), an industrial city in eastern Ukraine, and was first exposed to music at age five when his mother bought him a small piano. He studied classical piano and choir music after entering music school, and during his final year there discovered jazz, going on to study it alongside classical piano at Krivoy Rog Music College. A concert by Ukrainian jazz pianist and composer Sergey Davidov confirmed his path as a jazz musician; Davidov later became his teacher and mentor at Kharkiv State University of the Arts, where Chupakhin earned one of his two eventual master's degrees in Jazz Studies.

In 2005 Chupakhin entered the First Moscow International Jazz Piano Competition, launching his professional career. In 2007 he formed his own project, Acoustic Quartet, with trumpeter Dmytro Bondarev, bassist Denis Moroz, and drummer Sergey Balalaev — a group whose "tasteful mix of traditional jazz, folk, contemporary improvisation and European classical music" made it one of the most prominent Ukrainian jazz ensembles of the post-Soviet era. The quartet recorded three albums of mostly original music (USB-Blues, 2009; Toy, 2010; Anticipation of New, 2014) plus two further collaborative discs with singer Anya Tchaikovskaya, and shared festival stages with international names including John Scofield, Trilok Gurtu, and Gonzalo Rubalcaba — shared bills, not recorded collaborations. In 2010 Acoustic Quartet won the Grand Prix at the Jazz Competition for Young Performers at the Usadba Jazz Festival in Moscow.

In 2012 Chupakhin was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the United States, enrolling for the 2012–13 academic year at William Paterson University in New Jersey, where he studied piano intensively under James Weidman and, in the jazz program then directed by Mulgrew Miller, also worked with Armen Donelian, Steve LaSpina, Vincent Herring, and Rich Perry; he earned his William Paterson master's in 2014. He returned to Ukraine for a year, then obtained an artist visa and relocated to New York in 2015.

His debut US album, Water, was self-released in October 2019, drawing praise for solos that were "subtle, persuasive, exploratory, never harsh or aggressive" and for a contemplative, Andrew Hill– and Bill Evans–inflected sensibility built from Charlie Parker, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Thelonious Monk. The nine-track record — recorded with an international band of James Robbins (bass), Jonathan Barber (drums), Yoav Eshed (guitar), Sergey Avanesov (saxophone), and Josh Evans (trumpet), with South African vocalist Vuyo Sotashe featured on two tracks — mixed six originals with a hymn arrangement and jazz standards by Monk and Coltrane.

Chupakhin has also worked extensively outside straight-ahead jazz: as keyboardist and co-arranger for Ukrainian singer-songwriter Sergey Babkin's band since 2005 across several studio albums, as a member of the Ukrainian funk-soul group SunSay (2007–2011), and — in New York from 2013 — as pianist in Brown House, a quartet with Vuyo Sotashe that folds Slavic melodicism into an African-inflected, jazz-adjacent sound. He has also recorded as a credited sideman for artists including vocalist Kristina Koller and percussionist Dan Kurfirst.

Music and Ukraine's war have run alongside each other throughout Chupakhin's career, most directly through his ongoing partnership with poet and novelist Serhiy Zhadan. Founded in 2018, the Zhadan & Fima duo — spoken word over piano and electronics — has released two albums, Місіонери ("Missionaries," 2019) and Ви готові? ("Are You Ready?," 2021). Chupakhin also composed the score for The Wild Fields (2018), Yaroslav Lodygin's film adaptation of Zhadan's novel Voroshylovhrad, earning a 2019 Golden Dzyga nomination for Best Composer from the Ukrainian Film Academy (he did not win). In 2025, his new band Fima Trio — with James Robbins on bass and compositions and Kayvon Gordon on drums — released Hymn for the Fallen, which Chupakhin described as "my own reflection on what's been happening in my country, in the world, with me": an album that sits with loss while insisting, in his words, that "whatever dies, then grows." He continues to perform regularly in New York, including at the gospel service of St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Harlem, a tradition previously associated with pianist Aaron Diehl.

Chupakhin's dual grounding in classical training and Ukrainian post-Soviet jazz — sharpened by Fulbright-funded study with Mulgrew Miller's circle at William Paterson — produced a pianist whose bebop vocabulary (Parker, Dameron, Powell, Monk) is filtered through a quieter, more contemplative touch closer to Andrew Hill or Bill Evans than to hard-driving post-bop. That same duality made him a genuine bridge between Eastern European and American jazz scenes: a player equally credible arranging pop-rock for Sergey Babkin, playing funk-soul with SunSay, or setting Serhiy Zhadan's poetry to piano and electronics. Hymn for the Fallen (2025) gave that bridge a direct, urgent connection to the war in his home country, without abandoning the exploratory restraint reviewers noted on Water.