Analysts expect Belarus's economy to decline during the coming months as it struggles with falling subsidies from Russia and mounting bills for the election.

Vassily Uxialyor, coordinator of the campaign "For Fair 2010 Elections," says that the mood has changed in Belarus. He says that increasingly, people believe that President Lukashenko this week did not win 50 percent of the vote needed to remain in office.

Uxialyor predicts that protests will become more serious in the spring.

Irish political scientist Donnaca O'Beachain is an expert on the street revolutions that overthrew authoritarian regimes in other former Soviet republics.

"Events that might happen, of course, is an overthrow," said O'Beachain. "That's happened in other post Soviet countries. But again, I don't think that conditions exist in Belarus for the kind of overthrow that we saw in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan – certainly not at the moment."

O'Beachain says most of the Belarussian economy still is in the hands of the state, giving the president enormous power over the country's 9.5 million people.

"Seventy percent of people are employed the public sector," O'Beachain added. "Students who are caught in demonstrations are bound to be expelled from the university, and then often drafted into the army."

With Europe and the United States turning a cold shoulder to Belarus, analysts say much depends on Russia.