Word order in Latin is only syntactically free. As in, if you change the word order, you aren't changing who did what. However, you're still changing the topic (whatever we were talking about) and comment (the new info that I'm adding in).

I'll give you an example:

• Puer puellam amat - boy loves girl; but more like "the boy loves a girl".
• Puellam puer amat - boy loves girl; but more like "a boy loves the girl".
• Amat puer puellam - boy loves girl; but more like "speaking on love, the boy loves a girl" (hard to convey in English).

Note how I used articles to convey roughly the same meaning in English. That's because what Latin is doing with the word order is not too unlike what English does with articles. Sure, you can use "the boy", "a boy", or simply "boy", it won't change the basic meaning, but it's still not "random".

And guess which language happens to use a similar system? Russian. The only major difference is that by default (i.e. you aren't focusing on any element), Latin would put the verb at the end and Russian in the middle; but it's the same variability.