While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, March 27

US President Joe Biden said that Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” in Poland Saturday, remarks a White House official said later were meant to prepare the world’s democracies for extended conflict over Ukraine, not back regime change in Russia.

Biden’s comments on Saturday, including a statement earlier in the day calling Putin a “butcher,” were a sharp escalation of the US approach to Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine.

In a major address delivered at Warsaw’s Royal Castle, Biden evoked Poland’s four decades behind the Iron Curtain in an effort to build a case that the world’s democracies must urgently confront an autocratic Russia as a threat to global security and freedom.

But a remark at the end of the speech raised the spectre of an escalation by Washington, which has avoided direct military involvement in Ukraine, and has specifically said it does not back regime change.

At least five people were wounded Saturday in two barrages of strikes that damaged infrastructure including a fuel storage facility in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, a rare attack there.

The attacks, approximately two hours apart, were an effort to "intimidate Ukrainians and diplomats from democratic countries who are in the city", Ukrainian presidential aide Andriy Yermak said on social media.

The strikes sent plumes of thick smoke over the city centre and Lviv residents out onto the streets to observe the dark clouds billowing and growing larger in gusts of wind.

Russia's oligarchs can continue to do business in Turkey so long as they respect national and international law, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Saturday.

Interviewed on the sidelines of the Doha Forum in Qatar, Cavusoglu was asked if Russian oligarchs facing sanctions from western countries could do business in Turkey.

"Of course, if it is legal, if it is not against international law, I will consider it," he said. "If it is against international law, that's another story."

US President Joe Biden will propose a minimum tax on billionaires as part of the fiscal 2023 budget that is expected to be unveiled on Monday, a document released by the White House showed. 

Biden’s “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax” would set a 20 per cent minimum tax rate on households worth more than US$100 million, in a plan that would mostly target the United States’ more than 700 billionaires, according to a White House fact sheet released on Saturday. 

The plan would require such households to pay the minimum tax of 20 per cent on all of their income including unrealised investment income that is now untaxed, the fact sheet said. 

Mick Schumacher suffered an horrendous high speed crash in qualifying for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix on Saturday as Lewis Hamilton failed to make it out of the opening Q1 session for the first time in five years after the race went ahead despite an attack on a nearby oil plant.

Schumacher in his second season in Formula One bounced off the Jeddah street circuit barrier at around 240kph after losing control of his Haas car when clipping a kerb.

Medics were on the scene quickly, lifting him out of the wreckage of his stricken car into an ambulance.