Why does CURL return shortcodes instead of unicode?

Question

PHP

I send a curl request to the api point of the local site and instead of unicode I get a string like this

не работает чето

On the site everywhere is charset utf-8. There are no problems with displaying Unicode anywhere.
I also deal with the client application through api - I get unicode.
Looks like a problem with the curl.
Application in php 5.2.

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $header);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT,	 'anyMeta/OAuth 1.0 - ($LastChangedRevision: 174 $)');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,  $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);

Update:
mb_detect_encoding('пацукен3') - returns UTF-8. How to make it readable?

Answer 1

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
do you have it written somewhere?
if not, then at the very beginning of the script loading, write down and try