Cyrillic characters in LaTeX

This one caused some headaches here, so recording the solution in case it’s useful to anyone else.

I wanted to include a Cyrillic string (copied and pasted from an email) in a LaTeX document whose default fonts didn’t support Cyrillic, but when I saved and compiled the file it was replaced by a string of question marks instead. After much poking around and experimentation, and with some assistance from Dave who is even more proficient in LaTeX than I, this solved it:

1. First off, make sure you’re saving your document in UTF-8. (In WinEdt, this is set under Document > Document Settings… > Format.)
2. In the document preamble, define the font family for cyrillicfont to one that matches your main package’s font (or that is close enough, but supports Cyrillic):

   \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T2A,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage{english}
\setotherlanguages{russian}
\newfontfamily{\cyrillicfont}{Times New Roman}

3. In the document body, add your Cyrillic content in the second pair of curly brackets of:

   \foreignlanguage{russian}{}