Unable to use cyrillic characters in mysql docker console
As it turns out this was indeed a Docker problem rather than MySQL.
Vanilla MySQL image is built on Debian 9 and by default it lacks UTF-8 support. So I had to follow these steps:

Login into Docker container with docker exec -it mysql1 bash and run apt-get update
Then run apt-get install vim apt-get install locales
Run dpkg-reconfigure locales and select 376 for ru_RU.UTF-8
Open ~/.bashrc and add


export LANG=ru_RU.utf8
export LANGUAGE=ru_RU.utf8
export LC_ALL=ru_RU.utf8


Exit the shell and restart the container

Now I can use Russian characters inside the MySQL docker console.
PS: I guess a cleaner and more &quot;Dockeresque&quot; solution would be to run these commands from a Dockerfile. If anybody could provide an answer with a dockerfile example, I'd be happy to accept it.