A humanoid robot filmed at the Volga Store in Saratov, Russia, began making kicking motions shortly after a customer pushed it. The robot, nicknamed Syoma by the store, regained its balance, adopted a fighting stance and moved its legs as staff attempted to restrain it. No serious injuries were reported.
The footage has been widely framed as a robot “fighting back,” but it does not establish that the machine recognized the push as an attack or independently chose to respond. The store has not released telemetry or a technical account of the incident, leaving open whether the robot was being remotely operated, ran a preprogrammed movement sequence, malfunctioned, or was part of a staged social-media clip.
Syoma appears to resemble a Unitree G1, although the model has not been officially confirmed. The standard G1 weighs about 35 kg and has 23 degrees of freedom. It can also be teleoperated, a capability Unitree has used in its own demonstrations, meaning fast balance recovery or martial-arts-style motions can look unusually lifelike on video.
The episode highlights a practical safety question for increasingly capable humanoid platforms: whether their movements are autonomous, operator-directed or scripted needs to be clear when they operate near the public. Until the store or the robot’s operator explains how Syoma was controlled, the video is evidence of a machine kicking near people—not proof that it retaliated on its own.
