…As May issues ultimatum to Moscow over Salisbury poisoning***

Ambassador Elin Suleymanov has been Azerbaijan’s top envoy to the United States since 2011, having previously served as consul general of Azerbaijan in Los Angeles from 2005.

Stationed in the United States for years now, he has made many connections to the Jewish community, visiting Israel in 2015 as part of a program sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, and more recently taking part in a panel discussion on the Caucasus region at the 2018 American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference in Washington, D.C.

As a representative of one of Israel’s oldest and strongest partners in the Muslim world, the ambassador spoke with JNS about his country’s rare relationship with the world’s only Jewish state, as well as some of the challenges in his region and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Theresa May has given Vladimir Putin’s administration until midnight on Tuesday to explain how a former spy was poisoned in Salisbury, otherwise she will conclude it was an “unlawful use of force” by the Russian state against the UK.

After chairing a meeting of the national security council, the prime minister told MPs that it was “highly likely” that Russia was responsible for the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. She warned that Britain would not tolerate such a “brazen attempt to murder innocent civilians on our soil”.

In a statement to the House of Commons that triggered an angry response from Moscow, the prime minister said the evidence had shown that Skripal had been targeted by a “military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia”. Describing the incident as an “indiscriminate and reckless act”, she said that the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, had summoned the Russian ambassador to Whitehall and demanded an explanation by the end of Tuesday.

Russian officials immediately hit back, with Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian foreign minister, calling the remarks “a provocation” and describing the event as a “circus show in the British parliament”.

Andrei Lugovoi, a Russian member of parliament who stands accused of the 2006 murder of the former Russian agent, Alexander Litvinenko, said May’s decision to point the finger at Moscow so quickly was “at a minimum irresponsible”.

jns with additional report from Guardian UK