Laravel 5 route pagination url encoding issue

I built a laravel 5 application and now I am testing how it handles different inputs. Thus I encountered a weird problem. In the header I have a search field. It returns results, paginated by 10.

The problem

If a user inputs a letter, for an example "e" in English, everything works just fine. However, when a user enters a letter, for an example "e" in Bulgarian - the first page of the results is shown correctly and when a user hits page 2 the query in the search from "е" in Bulgarian changes to "%D0%B5" and no more results are shown. Here is an actual link to the website. http://podobri.eu

I guess this has something to do with the encoding but I can't see what I am doing wrong.

Here is the actual code

Route

Route::get('/search', [
   'uses' => '\Podobri\Http\Controllers\SearchController@getResults',
    'as'=>'search.results',
]);

SearchController

public function getResults(Request $request){

        $query = $request->input('query');
        $comments = Comment::where(function($query){
           return $query; 
        })->orderBy('created_at', 'desc')->get();

        if(!$query || $query==''){
            return view('problems.index')->with('comments', $comments);
        }

        $problems = Problem::where(DB::raw("CONCAT(problem_title, ' ', problem_description)"), 'LIKE', "%$query%")
                ->orWhere('location', 'LIKE', "%$query%")
                ->orWhere('category', 'LIKE', "%$query%")
                ->orderBy('created_at', 'desc')->paginate(10);

        Carbon::setLocale('bg');
        return view('search.results')
                ->with('comments', $comments)
                ->with('problems', $problems)
                ->with('title', 'Резултати за "'."$query".'" | Подобри')
                ->with('description', 'Резултати за "'."$query".'" в системата на Подобри');
    }

View

        @foreach($problems as $problem)
           <div class="margin-top--10">
              @include('problems.partials.problemblock')
           </div>
        @endforeach

        <!-- Paginating-->
        {!! $problems->appends(Request::except('page'))->render() !!}

Search form

<form action="{{ route('search.results') }}" role="search" class="navbar-form navbar-left head-form-responsive">
                    <div class="form-group">
                        <input type="text" required id='searchQuery' title="Търсете за проблеми" value="{{ Request::input('query') }}" name="query" class="form-control"
                               placeholder="Търсете за проблеми"/>
                    </div>
                    <button type="submit" id='searchBtn' class="btn btn-default">Търсете</button>
                </form>

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