Cancel military aid to Ukraine, says transport union
The RMT transport union has called for Britain to stop giving military aid to Ukraine.
A motion titled The Labour Movement Stands for Peace was submitted by the union's Paddington branch, urged Labour ministers to 'commit to work for a diplomatic, negotiated, lasting peace settlement'.
Passed at the RMT's annual meeting last week in Manchester, it said: 'Despite the defeat of the Conservative government by the Labour Party at the 2024 general election, Britain continues to play a belligerent role in international relations by supplying British-made weapons, military support, credit and billions of pounds in public funding in trying and failing to achieve a military defeat for Russia in Ukraine.
'We reject the politics of lower living standards and cuts in living standards to fund a policy of unending and escalating war that last year took us to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.'
The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign said news of the motion passing was 'very bad' and added on X: 'This is a union with an unusually strong Stop the War and particularly Communist Party of Britain influence in its leadership and apparatus.
'In the run-up to the AGM, we helped pro-Ukraine RMT members renew and extend contacts with rail workers in Ukraine.'
A spokesman for the RMT said: 'The motion was calling for a de-escalation of war zones across the world from Gaza, Yemen and Iran as well as Ukraine.
'As many commentators from Left and Right have commented, pouring billions into the Ukraine war zone will not create the conditions for peace negotiations but simply make them harder to achieve.
'The RMT does not support the Russian invasion of Ukraine but pouring weapons into one side against the other is counterproductive to creating the conditions for a peaceful solution.'
Posing with pro-Putin separatists
Eddie Dempsey, who replaced Mike Lynch as general secretary earlier in 2025, has faced questions after posing with pro-Putin separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Mr Dempsey visited eastern Ukraine in 2015, where he posed for a picture with Aleksey Mozgovoy, a commander in the 'Ghost Brigade' of pro-Russian separatists branded a terrorist organisation by Ukraine's supreme court.
At the time, an RMT spokesman said: 'The union does not support either Vladimir Putin or his actions in Ukraine, and we are backing global union pressure for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.'
Mr Dempsey said: 'I fully agree with the union's position.'
Meanwhile, Mr Lynch was in 2024 accused of peddling Kremlin propaganda after he claimed the EU had provoked trouble in Ukraine before Russia's invasion.
In an interview with the New Statesman, he said: 'There were a lot of corrupt politicians in Ukraine. And while they were doing that, there were an awful lot of people [in Ukraine] playing with Nazi imagery, and going back to the [Second World] War, and all that.'
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