The first members of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division landed in Poland on Saturday, while fresh American military aid was unloaded in Ukraine, as French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced new diplomatic efforts to stave off a feared Russian invasion.

Macron will meet with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Monday, then travel to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on Tuesday.

Scholz is slated to visit Kyiv Feb. 14 and Moscow the following day.

The high-level visits follow a show of support for Putin by Chinese President Xi Jinping, who met with Putin Friday ahead of the start of the Olympics in Beijing and presented a united front against the West, touting their “unshakable” relationship as they called for NATO to halt any expansion.

Macron has pushed for dialogue with Putin and has spoken to him several times in recent weeks. France is also moving troops to Romania as part of the NATO’s preparation for a potential Russian invasion.

The small group of command and control personnel who arrived at Poland’s Rzeszow military base Saturday will soon be joined by about 1,700 service members, mainly paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg, N.C.

The troop deployments follow President Biden’s decision to send 3,000 more troops to Poland and Romania as the standoff over Ukraine continues.

Meanwhile, Russia sent two of its of long-range Tu-22M3 bombers on a four-hour patrol over its ally Belarus on Saturday – just to the north of Ukraine.

The two nuclear-capable planes practiced maneuvers with the Belarusian air force, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

The show of force came two days after the U.S. accused the Kremlin on Thursday of an elaborate plot to fabricate an attack by Ukrainian forces that Russia could use as a pretext to take military action. The U.S. has not provided detailed information backing up the claims, which Moscow has vehemently denied.

Jon Finer, the deputy National Security Adviser, told NPR that Russia has used so-called “false flag” operations before.

“Russia has a long history of conducting operations like this where they will fabricate, essentially, some incident and then use that incident to justify military action that they wanted to take for wholly separate reasons,” Finer said.

“And the reason that we are talking about this stuff in advance is really twofold. One, we think it makes it a bit more complicated for them to conduct exactly this operation, should they choose to do that. But second, if they decide to go ahead anyway, it makes it a bit harder for them after the fact to use that operation as a legitimate justification for choosing to go to war.”

The continuing military threat could cause widespread food shortages, experts warn, if Ukraine’s productive grain fields – which produce 10 percent of the world’s wheat exports each year, along with staples like barley and rye – go fallow.

“My wife’s family has fields close to the occupied territories,” Andrey Marchenko, a Ukrainian agricultural consultant, told the Sunday Times of London. “And they’re not being used any more because of the military action taking place nearby.”