Emacspeak and UTF-8 -- possible?

["cmr.Pent@gmail.com" <cmr.Pent@gmail.com>]

I'm having the following problem: when I run emacspeak, I cannot input
or load cyrillic characters. My emacs version is 21.4, my language
environment is UTF-8, and in plain emacs cyrillics work just fine.
When I invoke emacs using "emacspeak" command, all non-latin
characters turn into umlauts.

The funny thing is that even on gnu.org site (I use w3m) some unicode
symbols (like quotation marks) turn into umlauts. I have a suspicion
that the problem is in emacspeaks' inability to work with multibyte
characters but I'm not sure because of my poor understanding of emacs'
character coding internals.

I'm really only a occasional user of emacspeak, but nevertheless I'd
be glad to know if there is a way to overcome the problem. For now it
would be Ok if cyrillics are displayed properly even if they are not
read aloud at all or are mistakenly read as umlauts.