ROME, December 16. /TASS/. Authoritative Italian journalist and politician Giulietto Chiesa is being kept in custody in Estonia without proper explanation of the causes, his wife, Fiammetta Cucurnia, told TASS late on Monday.

“Giulietto is being kept in a detention ward. His mobile phone has been taken from him. But what is most surprising is that neither he nor the Italian foreign ministry have been explained the reason for his detention,” she said.

Chiesa arrived in the Estonian capital city Tallinn early on Monday to take part in a conference entitled “Is Russia Europe’s Enemy?” However he failed to do that, since he was arrested in a hotel, his wife said, adding that the Italian ambassador to Italy was staying with the journalist.

The local media said the Italian journalists and former member of the European Parliament, who openly criticizes the policy of NATO’s eastwards expansion conducted by the United States and some European countries, particularly the Baltic republic, had been put on a blacklist of personae non grata.

Chiesa spent many years in Russia and witnessed the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the birth of new Russia. He visits Russian quite frequently and now he is among the few in Europe who openly speaks about what is going on in Ukraine and where the Ukrainian crisis is rooted in. Chiesa organizes conferences and seminars where he condemns the United States’ policy and warns against one-polar world. The latest such conference took place on December 12 at the national parliament and involved international experts, political observers, commentators.

On December 13, Chiesa organized a roundtable meeting within the framework of the Nobel Peace Prize Winner summit in Rome. The meeting was attended by Federica Mogherini, European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

Apart from that, Chiesa has launched his own information project aiming to present alternative vision of the developments in eastern Ukraine in contrast to the official European media.