Just out of curiosity, try replacing
Code:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1251" />
with
Code:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
And remove the XML line, what you're doing with that is telling the browser that your page is XML, which it isn't; That's the problem down the road
I'm pretty sure that what you did is give the characters the incorrect encoding, then override that with an incorrectly used XML tag.