[h-e-w] emacs, cyrillic, utf-8

[Sam Steingold]

I can open in Emacs a utf-8 file with Cyrillic characters in it and it
is displayed just fine - with correct glyphs &c.
I set `default-input-method' to "cyrillic-yawerty" in .emacs,
so when I try C-\ `toggle-input-method', I get 2 "character outline
boxes" in the modeline and when I type, I see these "character outline
boxes" in the buffer instead of the characters I just typed.
When I save the buffer, kill it, and re-visit the file,
I see what I just typed displayed correctly as Cyrillic!
So, why does Emacs display the characters that I type as boxes
(rectangles) but shows them correctly when loaded from a file on disk?

I use:

   (setq default-input-method "cyrillic-yawerty")
   (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
   (when (fboundp 'utf-translate-cjk-mode) (utf-translate-cjk-mode 1))

when I type using cyrillic-yawerty, I get this:

  character: а (07120, 3664, 0xe50, U+0430)
    charset: cyrillic-iso8859-5
             (Right-Hand Part of Latin/Cyrillic Alphabet (ISO/IEC 8859-5): 
ISO-IR-144.)
 code point: 80
     syntax: w  which means: word
   category: y:Cyrillic  
buffer code: 0x8C 0xD0
  file code: 0xD0 0xB0 (encoded by coding system mule-utf-8-unix)
    display: no font available

when I save the file, kill the buffer and visit the file again, that
character becomes

  character: а (01212120, 332880, 0x51450, U+0430)
    charset: mule-unicode-0100-24ff
             (Unicode characters of the range U+0100..U+24FF.)
 code point: 40 80
     syntax: w  which means: word
   category: y:Cyrillic  
buffer code: 0x9C 0xF4 0xA8 0xD0
  file code: 0xD0 0xB0 (encoded by coding system mule-utf-8-unix)
    display: by this font (glyph code)
     -outline-Courier New-normal-r-normal-normal-13-97-96-96-c-80-iso10646-1 
(0x430)

So, how do I tell cyrillic-yawerty to insert UTF-8?!

or, alternatively, how do I make Emacs display "cyrillic-iso8859-5"
characters properly?

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://www.podval.org/~sds) running w2k
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