Winnipeg orchestra conductor reunites with wife after her harrowing escape from Ukraine

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 Fundalon Thursday.

As the war entered its third week, Russia widened its military offensive on Friday, striking near airports in western Ukrainefor 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," Raiskinsaid. "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.

They made it to a packed station and managed to catch a train out of Ukraine with other evacuees. Adozen people squeezedinto four-person compartments on the 40-hour train ride, Raiskin said.

His wife was conserving battery power on her smartphonethroughout the journey. Occasionally she would turn it on and send him one-word texts of the station names they were passing.

They made it to a town in southwest Ukraine and eventually crossed into Slovakia.

Raiskin waited for them at the border, where there were thousands of women, babies, children, seniors and others crossingoveron foot.

Theyreunited and the trio walked a couple of miles to Raiskin's car, parked in a potato field in a nearby village. They drove to a nearby community, spent the night and then went to Bratislava.

"Really a very, very dramatic experience,"Raiskinsaid."But you know, the joy of embracing both of them the moment they were in safety of the European Union country was tremendous."

His mother-in-law is now fighting for her life in a hospital in Bratislava after contracting COVID-19.

"It's one thing to be safe and not being under artillery assault and bombardment. Other thing is to manage to fight this absolutely vicious disease, which is still with us, and it's COVID infection."

Raiskin is full of anger, desperation, sadness and resignation "over this terrible and senseless act of brutal aggression."

"It really breaks my heart," he said.

He grew up inSt. Petersburg butin 1990,at the age of 20 and during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he left.

Raiskinsaid he had a feeling at the time the country was headed down a path that would not end well.

"For me, Russia was always represented in my mind, in my upbringing, by its tremendous cultural values. It is still the country that gave the world great music of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, great poetry by Pushkin, great books by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and this is what I want my country to be known and remembered for."