Russian technology blogger, Eldar Murtazin, has set the mobile world on fire today with a Twitter post suggesting that Microsoft might be whetting their appetite for a purchase of Nokia’s mobile division. This would be in addition to the software giant’s recent acquisition of Skype for $8.5b earlier this month.

“MS&Nokia deal could be closed in 2011. MS want to buy Nokia Mobile division. No info about price/terms/dates.” Popped up on Murtazin’s Twitter recently and in his Russian tweets there have been suggestions that there’s a lot of moving and shaking in the two companies. The suspicion is that by next week, we’ll be hearing about Microsoft’s intentions.

If this goes through, Nokia may vanish from the smartphone ecology entirely. That’s a hard pill to swallow—but they have been suffering terribly under rising costs and dropping distribution. Microsoft’s almost $2b to Nokia to subsidize smartphones for the future using the MS Windows Phone 7 OS certainly set the stage for this sort of move, but at the time it didn’t look like MS wanted to handle the manufacturing and distribution angle on the phones themselves.

By this time next week, we’ll know if Nokia will still be with us in the mobile market.

Naturally, neither Microsoft nor Nokia are commenting on this matter.