Mikhailov was detained at one of Moscow's airports on his return from vacation, according to his associates, as reported by the Telegram channel Novaya Respublika, the BNK agency and the press service of the regional Communist Party (KPRF) branch.
He is accused under Part 2 of Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code, which covers public justification of terrorism using the internet. The charge carries a fine or a prison term of five to seven years. He is currently being held in a temporary detention facility.
According to the KPRF branch, the case stems from a 2024 post in which Mikhailov spoke in defense of sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky and Sergei Udaltsov, coordinator of the Left Front. Kagarlitsky was earlier sentenced to five years in a penal colony on a terrorism-justification charge over a video about the explosion on the Crimean Bridge; his sentence was toughened in February 2024. Udaltsov was convicted under the same article after publishing posts in support of members of a Marxist circle in Ufa who were accused of creating a terrorist community.
Mikhailov is first secretary of the KPRF's branch in the Komi Republic. In 2021 he won a State Duma seat in a single-mandate district. He took part in protests against the construction of a landfill at Shiyes station in the Arkhangelsk Region and campaigned for environmental protection and free access to the internet. A year earlier, the election commission refused to register him as a candidate for head of Komi, rejecting some of his signatures.
After the war began in 2022, Mikhailov was sanctioned by the European Union, Canada, New Zealand, the United States and Ukraine. According to Meduza, the US sanctions were prompted by the adoption of the law on "fakes" about the army, which Mikhailov did not vote for.
In the September 2026 State Duma elections, Mikhailov failed to win re-election in the Syktyvkar single-mandate district. Stanislav Kochev, a war veteran and graduate of the presidential "Time of Heroes" program running for United Russia, won. According to Novaya Gazeta Europe, Mikhailov received the most votes in Syktyvkar and was the only candidate from Komi to call for peace during the campaign; about a month and a half before the vote, attempts were made to remove him from the ballot. After the election he was one of the initiators of a rally against falsification in the Komi capital.
In spring 2023, FSB officers killed Mikhailov's former aide Vladimir Evstigneev during a detention; he was suspected of preparing an explosion at an oil facility.