There is a reasonable chance it was a Russian false flag to pin on Ukraine to justify further mobilisation
That would be a
cui bono but nothing I have seen and everything I have shows the Russian govt. not requiring such measures to garner support. Putin just won a landslide election, the majority of Russians appear to support the Special Military Operation and the Russian armed forces have seen a huge swell in volunteers.
In fact, I've struggled to find motivations for many state actors to do this - though the professionalism of the killers is a hint to state-backed training at the least. For Russian false flag I could only see it if they wanted to open up a new front. E.g. the attack could be pinned on Georgia or (lol!) Moldova. But I really don't see Russia as wanting to open up new fronts at all. For the West, there is one
cui bono that I can come up with which would be to pin it on Kiev or Ukie command.
This is Olksiy Danilov, Ukie defence head, saying it's a fun day in Moscow yesterday and that Ukraine should give them more fun days.
Why would Washington benefit from this attack being pinned on Kiev? Hypothetically because at this point they have certainty that they are not going to retake Crimea, near certainty that they're not going to reclaim Donetsk and Luhansk any time soon and all signs point to Russia being on the cusp of some major new advances. Zelensky has staked everything on no negotiations with Russia and senior leadership in Ukraine might kill him if he did. Biden has staked a lot on victory in Ukraine and it's an election year. America
needs to negotiate with Russia and they likely want to do directly without Kiev running point on that. After all the bigging up they have given Kiev they need something to justify introducing a degree of distance and bringing Kiev down a peg so that others can sideline them. Pinning something like this on Kiev gives them the means to do that. It may not even have to be a 'false flag' per se - Ukraine certainly has such elements willing to do this whether sanctioned by Kiev or not.
Macron appears to be serious about sending French troops into Western Ukraine, bolstered by contributions from other countries. The theory is that they serve as garrison forces freeing up more Ukie soldiers to go and die against Russian guns rather than Kiev having to negotiate. But if something like this is attributed to Ukraine then that both clears out Ukranian loyalist troops and hands military control of Western Ukraine to Western forces and lets them sideline it internationally for its "involvement in this atrocity".
There doesn't need to be some grand conspiracy here. Ukranian forces have attacked civillian targets before whether that be a market place or the innumerable incidents before Russia's invasion in Donetsk. It's completely possible that this was planned and done by some Ukranian faction without any sanction from the very top levels, but more somewhere in the middle layers. But
IF we are looking for reasons why a state might carry this out, conspiratorially, that's the one I can come up with that seems to me to have the most plausible motivations behind it.
EDIT: It occurs to me a second theory, also Western-backed, which is just sheer ineptitude on the part of some Washington faction that thinks actions like this will undermine support for Putin amongst the Russian people. Putin himself characterised the Western warnings as 'threats' did he not? This idea would backfire horribly and shows a gross misunderstanding of the Russian psyche. But such gross misunderstandings of foreign cultures have been a hallmark of Washington in recent years.
