= new reply since forum marked as read
The EU and Europe have to be weakened. That's the goal. There's a claim that bringing the West down isn't the goal, since, well, the Russians consider themselves superior and all that. It's a case of arguing from a misperceived premise as to what they actually think, when what they think and plan is obvious from what they say and do. Aristotelian to the core, it prefers sophistry to reality, our perceptions of what they think to what they say they think.
One needs a special kind of arrogance for that type of reasoning with the goal of denying reality. But I digress ...
Helping the flow of immigrants/refugees helps that goal in various ways. Brexit is one. Supporting xenophobic parties in Central Europe is another. Creating social disruption and increasing expenses is another.
And, as with the media "leaks" in the US, Putin got a heckuva lot of help from those who think him their enemy. All the blather about how these were refugees, several years after leaving the war zone; how they were Syrians, when most weren't; how they were families, when the early waves were mostly male; how they were educated and middle-class, when the vast majority weren't. It was mixed, but the preponderance went one way in reality and the other way in the way the media wanted to show them. It was important for personal and political reasons, in some cases for reasons of religion or empathy (for some, not for others) to mischaracterize them--fake news, in other words--to accomplish the ends.
In a few cases the falseness of earlier reporting and the denial that it was biased was noted without comment--"unlike before, now most of the refugees are women and children, the men having gone ahead to prepare for their arrival." But if the men went ahead without the women and children ...? Yeah. 
