Late reply, so I doubt anyone will read this, but just in case: No, I would not say Ukraine should give up. (You seem to be doing too much "expecting" and not enough actual listening.)

> Except, I'm pretty sure this reasoning would prevent people like Ghandi or MLK from ever existing, and that's actively harmful.

That is actually a good point. Such people live in such environments, and choose to go against the environment, knowingly paying the price, in order to try to bring about social change. Such people are outside my comments - they know what they're doing, they know what's going to happen, and they do it anyway for good reason. They have my admiration, not my "you should have known better".

There's one more hole in what I said that you haven't mentioned - inconsistent rules. You can know you're in that kind of environment, say something, and get nailed anyway, because the mob or some prosecutor decides that what you said crosses the line, even though they didn't say that for the last N people who did similar things. In that situation, we're just back at "Pakistan is morally wrong" with nothing the person could do to avoid it.