Mayor: 7 injured following Russian attack on Kyiv.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said via his official Telegram channel that an 18-year-old and a 9-year-old girl were taken to the hospital after Russia unleashed a missile attack against Kyiv in the early hours of Sept.

21. Five others were reported wounded in Kyiv's Darnytskyi district after debris caused a fire at a gas station and shattered windows in the nearby two-story building. Air defense was at work in the capital from 4 a.m. till 6:40 a.m. local time.

Air raid alert was active in all Ukrainian oblasts. Several explosions were also heard in the city's Holosiivskyi districts, and first responders have been also dispatched to Sviatoshynskyi and Shevchenkivskyi districts. Earlier, the Air Force warned that Russia had launched cruise missiles toward Kyiv Oblast and other regions.

Explosions were also reported in Kharkiv and Rivne.

Development Manager, Canadian Correspondent

Olena Goncharova is a development manager and Canadian correspondent for the Kyiv Independent. She first joined the Kyiv Post, Ukraine's oldest English-language newspaper, as a staff writer in January 2012 and became the newspaper's Canadian correspondent in June 2018. She is based in Edmonton, Alberta.

Olena has a master's degree in publishing and editing from the Institute of Journalism in Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv.

Olena was a 2016 Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellow who worked for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for six months.

The program is administered by the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia.