 During an official visit to the Soviet Union in 1986, Bulgarian defence minister Dobri Dzhurov arranged for a Bulgarian cosmonaut to be sent to the station with Soviet assistance.Additional talks with Glavkosmos were subsequently initiated by CLSR director Prof. Boris Bonev, and an official agreement for a joint Soviet-Bulgarian mission was signed on 22 August 1986.Although similar in arrangement to the previous Interkosmos flight, this mission was a bilateral scientific agreement independent of the Interkosmos programme.