This is good question, I was asking my self same thing, and i guess it depends on what type of encoding are they using in main DB, because in Unicode it looks like it’s not the same, U+0061 a Latin Small Letter A and U+0430 а Cyrillic Small Letter A, obviously not the same value.
src. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters

And here are few other resources just in case
http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/en/general-info/unicode.html
http://www.utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8-table.pl