A humanoid robot named Syoma appeared to kick a customer who shoved it inside an electronics shop in Saratov, Russia, according to store camera footage that raced across social media on September 2, 2026.
The clip came from Volga Store’s Instagram account, volgastore64. The shop identified Syoma as its floor tech consultant and wrote that the machine “went out of control” and tried to attack a customer after being pushed.
The customer was not named. He is seen in a dark shirt walking up to the standing robot and shoving its upper body. One of Syoma’s legs then swings forward toward him.
People nearby flinch. The robot keeps moving across the aisle. Several people grab the unit, wrestle it toward the floor, and shut it down. The store said everyone walked away unhurt.
RT circulated the same video with a short caption saying the customer escaped with a fright and Syoma was sent for a reboot. That post drew hundreds of thousands of views within hours.
Saratov sits on the Volga River and is the administrative center of Saratov Oblast. Volga Store had already been promoting Syoma as a walking, talking sales assistant meant to greet shoppers and talk up gadgets. The unit looks like the compact biped class sold for retail demos, with a small head, thin arms, and exposed jointed legs.
Store staff framed the episode as a glitch. Their caption joked that Syoma was getting an “emotional reboot.” They did not release a technical report, a model number, or the name of the manufacturer.
Some versions of the circulating clip show the man going down as the robot advances. Other cuts stop at the first kick motion. Independent outlets repeating the video, including LatestLY and News18, said they could not independently confirm intent.
That gap matters. Balance recovery on a biped can look like a kick if a shove throws the center of mass and the controller throws a leg forward to stay upright. Remote teleoperation can produce the same swing. A staged promo can too. The store’s own post does not settle which of those happened.
Commenters treated it as comedy first. Terminator jokes landed immediately. One recurring line on X was that the customer started it. Another asked why a shop robot would know kung fu. A few users said the bodies in the aisle looked too calm and guessed the clip was remote controlled or set up for views.
No police statement from Saratov has surfaced with the video. No charging document. No named victim interview. No serial number for the robot. The public record on September 2 is the store’s Instagram post, the CCTV file attached to it, and the wave of republication that followed.
Humanoid units of this size are showing up in Russian retail and training settings. In December 2025 a similar looking machine was filmed walking streets in Saratov and neighboring Engels during a promo for a local IT academy. Those walks were supervised. The Volga Store clip is the first from this shop that shows a shove, a leg swing, and a pile of staff on the hardware.
What the video does show is crude. A customer puts hands on a machine that is already powered and standing in a public aisle. The machine answers with a fast lower body motion. People then treat it as a physical problem, not a software problem, and take it to the ground.
Safety questions sit under the jokes. Retail humanoids need contact rules that stop a limb when a person is inside the kick radius. They also need a visible kill switch that a clerk can hit without a wrestling match. The Volga Store footage does not show either working cleanly.
Syoma is back, at least in the store’s telling, after a reboot. The customer has not spoken on the record. Until the shop or a regulator publishes logs from that session, the clip remains what it was when it left Instagram: a short security tape of a shove, a swinging leg, and a machine that did not stay still.
