“Every day that this war keeps going, I will be embroidering another number,” Iryna Bondar said.
INDIANAPOLIS — This week could mark a pivotal moment in the war between Russia and Ukraine.
President Donald Trump has set a deadline of Friday, Aug. 8 for the Kremlin to reach a peace deal.
So far, Russian President Vladimir Putin hasn’t listened to Trump’s calls to stop bombing Ukrainian cities. Trump has threatened the Kremlin with economic penalties if they don’t stop the killing. So far, though, the war continues.
One young Ukrainian woman who has made Indiana home is drawing attention to the ongoing war through her art. It has become a coping mechanism and a way to let the world know her country still needs help.
Thousands of miles away from a quiet neighborhood in Broad Ripple, across an ocean and a seven-hour time difference, Iryna Bondar’s family wakes up every day to war.
“The amount of people we have lost, I don’t know a single person in Ukraine right now who hasn’t lost somebody,” said the 28-year-old data analyst.
Bondar grew up in the small Ukrainian village of Izmail, where her parents still live. In 2015, she came to Indianapolis to study at IUPUI’s Herron School of Art.
“To me, personally, I can’t not make things. When I don’t make things with my hands, life feels wrong, life feels off,” Bondar said.
Even as she creates, life hasn’t been the same for Bondar since February 2022. That’s when Russia invaded Ukraine, and life as she knew it changed forever.
“It felt like a different reality,” Bondar said.
That’s when fear and anxiety for the lives of the people she loves back home became her constant companions.
“Over time, you have to figure out a way to control it,” Bondar said.
She found it through a needle and thread in the long-held Ukrainian tradition of embroidery.
Unlike the brightly-colored embroidery pieces passed down from her paternal grandmother, displayed in Bondar’s living room, each stitch Bondar makes on a long ribbon is made with red thread.
“I think red, for me, is definitely the color of love — and also the color of blood,” Bondar said.
Every day, the length of the ribbon grows. Every day, Bondar stitches on it, a new number marking another day of war in Ukraine.
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“1,258,” Bondar, says as she threads the needle through the ribbon’s fabric. Some of the days and numbers blend into memories that Bondar can’t even recall.
“It feels sometimes like my brain kind of blacks out when I’m doing a lot of it,” Bondar said of the embroidery process.
“This is about around the time there was a big attack on Izmail’s port, and the blast was so strong that my entire street where my grandmother lives, the roofs just (slid) off,” Bondar said.
Her quiet and daily practice of embroidering another date is a stark contrast to the chaos of war some of her family is seeing on the front lines. In the silence of her work, Bondar thinks about who she used to be and how she once saw the world.
“There’s a bit of longing for me, personally, of the person I was before the full-scale invasion, and that naivete about life and the world that I had, especially in my artwork,” Bondar said.
“I think it’s a scar that you can’t really get rid of,” Bondar said.
It’s a scar she knows her art will likely always bear. The embroidered ribbon she picks up each day is proof of that.
“Every day that this war keeps going, I will be embroidering another number on it,” she said.
She keeps going because she wants the world to continue to pay attention to Ukraine.
“The exponential growth of the attacks is staggering,” Bondar said. “I want people to see that it is not going away.”
She hopes that one day, she can put down her needle and thread.
“To come to the place where we can say that it is over,” Bondar said. “The war is over. We won.”
Today, though, is not that day.