Output is three lines of Cyrillic (I don't know how to get this website to accept Cyrillic chars). Same thing when I write to a file instead of STDOUT.

I think the database transaction is not the problem. When I run Lingua::Identify on the items in the DB then compare the detected language to the item in the DB, it's getting the languages correct. It couldn't do that if the DB was returning non-Cyrillic characters, right?

This suggests the problem is in the output. But I am setting binmode on the output file with the correct encoding, just like in your example. I also tried declaring utf-8 encoding in the open statement, but am still getting the ANSII ourput. This is perplexing.