Kateryna Krupich and her two children climbed into the attic of a three-storey house, watching with horror as waters from a destroyed dam in southern Ukraine swallowed up the floors below them.The family was stranded under the rooftop of a neighbour's house on a heavily-flooded island near the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky without food and drinking water for almost 24 hours.

Thousands of people have been evacuated as their homes became submerged in water in southern Ukraine. As water continues to surge down the Dnipro River, the levels in the city of Kherson have continued to rise. One evacuee Oksana said her house was carried away by a torrent of water.

Floods have obscured the location of land mines, according to deminers. Russia and Ukraine laid thousands of mines in the run-up to Ukraine's counteroffensive.

Evidence was growing on Friday that there was an explosion at the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine around the time it collapsed, according to Ukrainian and U.S. intelligence reports and seismic data from Norway.

As the floodwaters began to recede, Ukrainian forces were trying to break through stout Russian defenses in the south and east.

The Kakhovka dam disaster saw thousands of people displaced and towns & cities destroyed.