The comments came the morning after the Ria Pizza restaurant, popular with soldiers, journalists and aid workers, was destroyed in the city, one of the largest still under Ukrainian control in the east.

"Strikes are only carried out on objects that are in one way or another linked to military infrastructure," said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

"The Russian Federation does not carry out strikes on civilian infrastructure," he added.

The Russian defence ministry said in a separate statement Wednesday that its forces had struck a "temporary deployment point" of senior command staff of Ukraine's 56th brigade.

Ukrainian officials have said the restaurant was mainly filled with ordinary people and that most of the victims were civilians.

The National Police said the strike, which came in the evening as the eatery was busy, had wounded 61 people. Emergency services counted three children among the dead.

They said a baby born in 2022 was among those wounded and warned that some people were still under the rubble.

The head of Ukraine's Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, stressed to AFP Wednesday that the victims were "mostly" civilians.

"They came to order food. In the evening there was a crowd of people," he said.

"If there are wounded military personnel, this information will be provided to the military leadership."

He accused Russia of trying to "distort" information on the strike.

An AFP journalist on the scene shortly after the strike saw the restaurant in ruins surrounded by debris with rescuers rushing to clear rubble and search for bodies.

Ukraine also said Wednesday that Russian shelling had killed three civilians in the north-eastern Kharkiv region.

The head of the region, Oleg Synegubov, said three men, aged 45, 48 and 57, died in Vovchaski Khutory village close to the border with Russia.

Russia has denied striking civilian infrastructure throughout its 16-month long Ukraine campaign.