The son of the conductor and composer Ivan Karabyts, Karabits was born in Kyiv (then in the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union).

He has done scholarly work on the musical archive of the Berliner Singakademie, such as transcribing the 1784 Johannes Passion of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, which was thought to be lost.

[3] In November 2007, the BSO announced the appointment of Karabits as their 13th Principal Conductor, after a unanimous vote from the orchestra musicians, effective with the 2009–2010 season.

[6] made his first conducting appearance at The Proms with the BSO in August 2009,[7] and formally took up the principal conductor post in October 2009.

Based on these appearances, in July 2015, the Deutsches Nationaltheater and Staatskapelle Weimar named Karabits their next Generalmusikdirektor (GMD) and chief conductor, effective with the 2016–2017 season, with an initial contract of 3 years.

[27][28] He recorded a complete cycle of the seven Prokofiev symphonies with the BSO on Onyx from 2013 to 2015, which included the symphonic fragment of 1902, the original version of the fourth, and the alternative ending for the seventh.

[29] A series of CDs with music by composers from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Ukraine, such as Kara Karayev, Boris Lyatoshynsky, Chary Nurymov and Avet Terterian has appeared on the Chandos label.