Companies from emerging markets attract more and more attention both from scholars and business people. It happens due to their active growth and increasing influence on world economy. During the last couple of decades, they have significantly increased and diversified the scope and scale of their operations. Their involvement in global supply chains has largely changed their approaches to doing business both in home and host markets and raised the need for organizational and technological innovations, stimulating adoption of various sustainable practices. The paper presents an essay style discussion about the state of research and practice in the development of sustainable supply chains and the role and place of emerging markets multinational enterprises (MNEs) in this process. It addresses sustainable activities of Russian companies using institutional perspective as a theoretical basis for key propositions. It considers company’s legitimacy in host markets as a major driver for sustainable practices implementation which is supported by a number of examples from Russian companies and raises the question - whether sustainability could be considered as innovation by emerging market MNEs