Provincial government protests British-flagged tanker docking in Ushuaia amid sovereignty dispute

A memorial wall in Ushuaia honoring the 649 Argentine soldiers killed in the 1982 war stands near where the British-flagged oil tanker VS Promise was docked on Monday, prompting a sharp rebuke from the Tierra del Fuego provincial government. Governor Gustavo Melella’s office said the vessel’s presence violated provincial law 852, which forbids British-flag ships as a protest against the United Kingdom’s “illegitimate occupation” of the Malvinas, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.

The complaint arrives after President Javier Milei’s January decree that seized control of the Port of Ushuaia, citing alleged financial irregularities and infrastructure issues, and displaced the provincial port authority. Officials demanded that the federal government disclose how the tanker was authorized and reverse the intervention, warning they will not stay silent to unilateral decisions. The VS Promise, a 228-metre vessel registered to Valloeby Promise Ltd on the Isle of Man, is used by a Total Energies-led export consortium and can transport roughly 500,000 barrels of crude.

As of Monday night, the Milei administration had not issued a comment. The dispute underscores the enduring sensitivity of the Falklands sovereignty issue, heightened recently by a World Cup match incident.