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Many are pointing fingers at Russian President Vladimir Putin for giving weapons to the pro-Russian Ukrainian rebels that are being linked to the shootdown of the Malaysia Airlines jet that crashed in Ukraine, but former Rep. Ron Paul says that Putin shouldn't be blamed."Putin is a little bit smarter than that," Paul told John Bachman on "America's Forum" on Newsmax TV on Friday. "I don't think he would ever come close to participating in an act like this."Watch Newsmax TV now onandGet Newsmax TV on your cable system – Click Here Now The Texas Republican said that the fact that Russians may have provided the weapons to the Ukrainian rebels is not enough to put the blame on the Russian president."That may well be true, but guess what, ISIS has a lot of American weapons," he said. "We sent weapons into Syria to help the rebels and al-Qaida ends up getting it — it doesn't mean that our American government and Obama deliberately wanted ISIS to get American weapons.""So who gets the weapons is a big difference between how they got them and what happened and what the motivations were," Paul added. "So even if it was a Russian weapon — doesn't mean a lot."The former Texas congressman says that he does find it "interesting the way the flight was changed — make it land in Russia and it would have been a greater detriment to the Russians and the Cold War could be resumed."Paul contends that "there's a lot of people itching for the Cold War and they don't want to do anything to even talk with the Russians."The former Republican presidential candidate says that the United States shares responsibility for the conflict between Russia and Ukraine."It's pretty evident that the whole problem in Ukraine started approximately a year ago when the Europeans, along with the United States, overthrew an elected government and overthrew [former Ukrainian President Viktor] Yanukovych — insisting that there'd be civil strife over there," he explained.The United States instituted sanctions against Russia Tuesday aimed at Russia's financial institutions and defense sector, which Paul considers "acts of war.""They want to put on these sanctions, which are actually acts of war and the consequence is usually economic blowback," he said.Paul says that sanctions are "seductive," but that in reality it "is just war talk, war mongering.""If we get into a fight with a country and war breaks out, the very first thing we do is put on sanctions and blockade them and try to keep resources out of their country," he said."So if you start with that, I consider this an act of war. It's not quite like shooting at each other," the Texas Republican added.Paul says that we should approach the situation with the downed Malaysian jet "cautiously.""Under these circumstances, it's very difficult to get the real information so everybody's angling to propagandize and make their position known," he said."It'd be unwise to say, well, the Russians did it, or the Ukrainian government did it, or the rebels did it."