Broken Unicode

Question

Never thought I would have a problem with unicode, but here
it is.
The web site I am working on is ColdFusion MX7 and mySQL
5.0.45. The data in the DB is UTF-8 encoded, collation is set to
utf8_general_ci. The output of the data from DB is valid, all
characters are displayed properly.
Problem starts when I try to update records via site's web
interface. I have attached a piece of code as an example (the whole
query is rather large) to show that there is no charset messing in
the query itself. However, whenever I post unicode characters (the
site is bilingual, English and Russian) they get converted to
something weird. For example, small Russia letters "a" converted
into number 0, "b" into number 1 and so on. So whenever I try to
post something like
"Колбаса" - I get a bunch
of numbers and symbols, some of which are invisible.
I talked to the hosting support for 2 days already, but they
still "investigating", which sort of leads me to think they have no
clue.

Answer 1

application.cfm already has:
<cfcontent type="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<cfset setEncoding("URL", "UTF-8")>
<cfset setEncoding("Form", "UTF-8")>
I also tried using in the page that posts data to the server,
common include and application.cfm
<cfquery datasource="skazkaf_skazka">
SET CHARACTER SET UTF8
</cfquery>
<cfquery datasource="skazkaf_skazka">
SET NAMES 'UTF8' COLLATE 'utf8_general_ci'
</cfquery>
How do I tell the driver version? This is a shared hosting,
the DSN connection was set up by support.