The verb is, though, unfamiliar to most Faroese, so the phenomenon cannot have been widespread. I have heard this manner of pronouncing Russian myself, and I know it is, if not widespread, at any rate sufficiently frequent. A number of Americans can't manage the retroflex r and substitute various things for it, e.g., w, as lampooned in the cartoon character Elmer Fudd. I wonder if there aren't similar problems in languages that have apical trills. There are also two competing s's in American English.
Some people can manage the retracted version better than the apical one.
Other people consider the retracted version to be a speech defect.