The reason for the wrong alt codes was "language for non-Unicode programs" in "Regional and Language options" which was set for the Russian language. Having switched it to English, the characters produced by the VBA engine reverted back to the Latin characters. It is also true that 'ChrW(####)' used in the VBA code to produce alt code characters is more consistent and reliable than '^####', though unfortunately I have not figured out how to type more than one character with the help of it.