Debian Version – How to Check Which Version of Debian is Running

You've told bash and other applications that your terminal uses the UTF-8 encoding. That's good only if your terminal actually does use UTF-8. Bash doesn't get to decide that the terminal encoding is, the terminal gets to decide.

If you want to use UTF-8, configure your terminal to use UTF-8. Since you're using SSH, you need to configure whatever terminal you're running the SSH client in to use UTF-8. That's the default on most modern systems, but apparently yours isn't set up this way.

You should avoid setting LC_CTYPE explicitly in a terminal: ideally the terminal will set this. However this doesn't always work, especially over SSH (on many systems, the SSH server forbids the client from setting LC_CTYPE).

If you need to set the environment variable, the right place would be .profile, not .bashrc.