It’s fair to call the Cape Tarkhankut site the linchpin of Russian air and naval defenses across the Black Sea. Which is why the Ukrainian armed forces blew it up.
Doesn’t this turn the Wagner mercenaries into even more of loose cannons? What’s stopping them to just fracture into chaotic splinter groups now?
There’s a BBC article right now that addresses that question in some detail. Take it with a grain of salt, but it points out that Wagner forces have not been on the ground in Ukraine since Prigozhin’s June march, Putin has had two months to plan for the transition, there are already replacement candidates, and the real difficulty may lie more in finding a leader with cash who will not oppose the Putin regime than in simply finding a leader, because Prigozhin was funding much of Wagner himself:
There’s a BBC article right now that addresses that question in some detail. Take it with a grain of salt, but it points out that Wagner forces have not been on the ground in Ukraine since Prigozhin’s June march, Putin has had two months to plan for the transition, there are already replacement candidates, and the real difficulty may lie more in finding a leader with cash who will not oppose the Putin regime than in simply finding a leader, because Prigozhin was funding much of Wagner himself:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66604261