No. There was a contract between Mali government and a private company for 10 years to use .ml domains and it expired on July 16th and the Mali government taken back control of them. No conspiracy in that regard.

Seems entirely unrelated.

The issue with .ml domains was only its free offerings, not its paid ones. And you can thank Meta for that. They sued the registrar managing several ccTLDs, including .ml, .ga, .gq, .cf, and .tk. Meta even goes so far to fabricate a conspiracy theory about the registrar being part of a cybercriminal ring.