Mikhail Mikhaylov
Mikhail Mikhaylov
Mikhail Mikhaylov is a future diplomat, specializing in international conflict mediation. A recent graduate from the University of Florida, Mikhail majored in International Studies and Political Science, with minors in Economics, Public Health, and Russian. He has worked on various government levels, ranging from local policy research with the City of Gainesville to national security analysis with the U.S. Department of State. He has also interned for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and volunteered at the Alachua County Crisis Center, supporting the 988 national suicide lifeline. Mikhail co-founded his university’s Ukraine Rebuilding Initiative (URI) in an attempt to unite Russian and Ukrainian students around a common humanitarian goal: helping Ukraine heal amidst the war. URI’s projects ranged from establishing student cultural exchanges to creating bomb shelter blueprints for bus stops, all funded by local crowdfunding and national grants (e.g., Projects for Peace). Under his leadership, URI has forged a sister-city alliance between Gainesville, FL and Nizhyn, Ukraine. To continue this legacy of rebuilding and healing communities impacted by war, Mikhail founded Off the Battlefield Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding URI’s mission globally. Simultaneously, Mikhail represented his university and the United States abroad as a Boren Scholar in Latvia, where he took courses on Eastern European cultural integration processes. By continuing to learn about international conflict mediation and comparative governance, Mikhail aims to: 1) create a long-sustaining just peace in Eastern Europe and 2) solve the U.S. healthcare crisis.