Russian is a heavily inflected language, so the order of words matters less. For example, in English you can say "the cat ate the bird", but if you reversed "cat" and "bird" this would be a different sentence entirely. In Russian "cat" would have the nominative case and "bird" accusative, so you can swap the words around and it would mean the same, though perhaps with different emphasis.

French doesn't do this; as with English only the pronouns have vestigial accusative, and in any case most inflections are lost in speech because French drops consonants from the end of words. So you have to depend on strict word order to preserve meaning.