Russian characters coming out as '?'

Question

I have data in MySQL such as "регистрацией в партнерской" but when it comes out in PHP echo'ed out it comes out as ????. My issue here is that I believe I have tried the obvious (see list below), so what else could I be missing?

1. SET NAMEs is UTF8 in Mysql
2. There is a header
3. I have tried with/without utf8_encode / utf8_decode
4. I've tried mb_convert_encoding
5. My table (Innodb) charset is utf8 with utf8_general_ci

If this is a direct duplicate please show me but I think I've hopefully covered the initial checks I should have!