Cyrillic handling in MySQL - bug?

[dev.stevenmitchell.net]

I am attempting to input, store, and output characters in UTF-8 but have ran into a problem with some cyrillic characters. For some reason all the characters seems to work fine (both input and output) EXCEPT for the following (case-sensitive):

Ё,Н,А,э,я,с

These characters become garbled:

▒?

The default character set for the database is (no table or column overrides):
DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

My browser settings are set to handle UTF-8 but I am getting the same error in Firefox, Opera and Explorer. My client operating system is Windows XP, the server is Debian. I assume it is a database issue. It seems odd that only a few of the characters are garbled, while the others seem to be working as expected.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.