Humanoid sales-assistant robot 'Syoma' at a Volga Store electronics shop in Saratov, Russia charged and kicked at a customer who had pushed it, and had to be restrained and shut down by staff

one customer and two store employees in a Saratov electronics shop; store says no serious injury

ATTRIBUTION AND CONTACT BOTH UNCERTAIN. The clip was posted by Volga Store (Volga Store 64) on Instagram on 31 Aug 2026 and covered by Insider Paper (2 Sep), Men's Journal via Yahoo (2 Sep) and OECD.AI AIM (3 Sep, with Hungarian, Chinese and Greek press). Sequence per sources: customer offers a handshake, robot does not respond, customer shoves it lightly, robot adopts a defensive stance and kicks at the customer, then turns on two employees until one restrains it from behind and it is shut down manually. The cited sources say 'kicking at' and do not establish that a kick landed; the store says no one was seriously injured and Men's Journal says no one was injured, so impact_realized is false. Three competing explanations are on record: a staged marketing stunt (Insider Paper notes the video 'leans more to the side of commercial'), a balance/stabilization algorithm reacting to the push, or a control malfunction; Insider Paper also notes most retail humanoids are not fully autonomous, i.e. it may have been teleoperated. Following the precedent of AIR-2026-0127 (Xinjiang humanoid kick), coded semi_autonomous with attribution flagged. The lead described the robot as Chinese-made; none of the cited sources states the manufacturer, so target_product leaves it unconfirmed. Store's own phrase for the fault was an 'emotional reboot'.