It actually seems pointless to have this rule if the only time it would ever be invoked is if someone openly and explicitly seceded a city in order to start recruiting somewhere closer to the front, and did so in such a way that you could prove their intent. If you make such a rule, it will never need to be enforced unless someone didn't bother to read the rules in the first place. People who did read the rules would merely ensure that they had some other plausible reason to secede a city in order to accomplish the same damn thing so they can point to their story and say, "See? I had an acceptable reason for doing this, so the rule does not apply." The problem is especially acute since every single reason that isn't explicitly "because it will help me win" is seemingly permissible if the rule is so narrowly interpreted.
I mean, what is the point here? In theory, it's to protect one realm (and group of players) from a particular action that exploits game mechanics to generate an advantage that the very existence of the rule implies must be unfair. That has unquestionably happened here. By introducing the question of intent, the rule is made practically unenforceable and its reason for existence compromised. It essentially makes it so that something that is apparently considered to be objectively unfair (generating a wartime advantage through secession) is only considered a violation of the rule against it if someone is foolish enough to admit that what they did was purely to generate that advantage and for no other reason. In other words, it states that the very same action is unfair if done for one specific reason but not unfair if done for any other reason at all, which is both a logical contradiction and utterly nonsensical. Either it's not fair or there's nothing wrong with it; it can't be both.
If the consensus is that intent is all that matters (and not the impact it's going to have on the other team, which seems to me to be the only reason to have made the rule in the first place), you might as well just scrap the rule altogether; several people have already suggested that it's been ages since it was actually enforced, which I think just goes to prove the point - as interpreted by Anaris and others, the rule is both pointless and virtually unenforceable. No one will be stupid enough to actually admit that they're seceding a city in order to gain a strategic advantage even though that's exactly what they're getting, and so the rule will never be invoked and the possibility of strategic secessions will be a de facto reality whether they are fair to the other side or not.
