Winnipeg orchestra conductor reunites with wife after her harrowing escape from Ukraine
CBC
Russian-born Daniel Raiskin can still feel the shock and disbelief that set in the morning Ukraine was attacked.
The music director of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and the Slovak Philharmonic was in Bratislava, Slovakia, preparing for a show, when the Russian invasion started on Feb. 24. His wife was in Ukraine.
"I can't describe the feeling of talking to your loved one and hearing the sounds of rockets and literally bomb bombardment explosions on the other side of the phone conversation," Raiskin told Up to Speed host Faith Fundal on Thursday.
As the war entered its third week, Russia widened its military offensive on Friday, striking near airports in western Ukraine for the first time as troops kept up pressure on the capital, Kyiv.
New satellite photos appeared to show a massive convoy outside Kyiv had fanned out into nearby towns and forests. The photos emerged amid more international efforts to isolate and sanction Russia.
A few weeks ago, Raiskin's wife travelled to Kharkiv in the northeast of the now war-ravaged country to help support her mother, who was undergoing chemotherapy.
The Russian invasion started just days after she arrived.
"I was really basically paralyzed with fear and knowledge that there's really basically nothing I could do," Raiskin said. "They were really very close to the epicentre of this bombardment."
Raiskin said one of the first things his wife did was go to a grocery store to stock up on food.
She called Raiskin and they talked as she waited in a long line for two hours to get into the store, the sounds of artillery and bomb blasts ricocheting nearby.
After a few days hunkered down at the apartment she grew up in, she and her mother realized they needed to leave.
The pair took what they could carry and set off for a train station, Raiskin said.
They went outside and waited for 45 minutes until someone in a vehicle passing by gave them a ride to the station.
Just getting there was a "horror story," said Raiskin, with roadways already damaged by tank tracks.
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